Previewing changes

[Ben Finney]

Aaron Bentley <aaron at aaronbentley.com> writes:

> Robert Collins wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 09:35 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> >> Is this the point at which 'bzr merge --preview' is doing something
> >> that is impossible to pass to the existing 'bzr diff' functionality?
> > 
> > A revspec might work - 
> > diff -r preview:BRANCHSPEC
> 
> Right, but then
> 1. How do you specify the merge type?
> 2. How do you enable --reprocess
> 3. How do you enable --show-base?
> 4. How do you specify a range of revisions to merge into the branch?

I can see that, for a "merge preview diff" function, there are good
reasons to want to use the UI features of *both* the 'merge' and
'diff' commands. (Thanks for pointing these out.)

Would one of the following UIs make sense:

    merge --preview --m-foo --m-bar --diff-options --d-spam --d-eggs /branch

or

    diff --d-spam --d-eggs --merge-options --m-foo --m-bar preview:/branch

Either of these (I'm not necessarily advocating *both* be added!)
would result in "prepare the merge according to merge options '--m-foo
--m-bar', then display the differences as though 'bzr diff' was
invoked with options '--d-spam --d-eggs'".

-- 
 \      “Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the |
  `\               strict truth.” —Mark Twain, _Following the Equator_ |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney