why does merge command sometimes not carry meta-data?

[Andrew Straw]

Hi, I'm a relative newcomer to bazaar, and I'm encountering some
behavior I don't understand. I have 2 branches for a project I'm working
on -- one which I share with others (my flydra-trunk branch), and one
which I keep my personal stuff layered on top (my flydra-ads branch).
The trouble I'm having is that when I merge from -ads into -trunk,
meta-data is lost. In other words, doing "bzr merge -r 1375..1378
../flydra-ads" in flydra-trunk seems to apply just a plain diff patch.
There is no information about which revisions of the flydra-ads branch
the merge corresponds to -- it will simply change flydra-trunk as if I
made the changes there originally. "bzr status" doesn't show any pending
merges.

The situation is completely different when merging the other way, from
flydra-trunk to flydra-ads. In this case, the meta-data is maintained,
and "bzr status" will correctly show the pending merges.

I have a feeling I simply don't understand something fairly basic, but
I'm struggling to figure it out. I'd appreciate any advice. FWIW, here's
the output of bzr info on my two branches. They are configured as
checkouts from my central server, but I get the same behavior when I
make new branches or reconfigure the repositories. Unfortunately, I
cannot make these branches publicly available.

> flydra-trunk$ bzr info
> Checkout (format: rich-root-pack)
> Location:
>        checkout root: .
>   checkout of branch: bzr+ssh://astraw@straweb/home/astraw/repos/flydra-trunk/
> 
> Related branches:
>   parent branch: bzr+ssh://astraw@straweb/home/astraw/repos/flydra-trunk/
>   submit branch: /home/astraw/src/flydra/flydra-ads


> flydra-ads$ bzr info
> Checkout (format: rich-root-pack)
> Location:
>        checkout root: .
>   checkout of branch: bzr+ssh://astraw@straweb/home/astraw/repos/flydra-ads/
> 
> Related branches:
>   parent branch: bzr+ssh://astraw@straweb/home/astraw/repos/flydra-ads/
>   submit branch: /home/astraw/src/flydra/flydra-trunk

These two branches came off the same original branch, and the
revision-ids are exactly the same for the early revisions.