Introducing Shelf 2

[James Westby]

On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 00:29 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
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> Hi all,
> 
> Most Bazaar users seem to love the 'shelf' command.  I think it's
> fantastically useful, and that's not vanity because the primary author
> was Michael Ellerman.
> 
> Nice as it is, shelf has limitations because it's based on applying
> patches.  It can't shelve renames.  It can shelve added files, but won't
> restore their file ids when you unshelve.  Basically, it's not as close
> to revert as it ought to be, which leaves users having to decide whether
> they need shelf or revert.
> 
> May I introduce Sheve 2?
> 
> It's based on iter_changes, merge, PreviewTree and packs.
> 
> When you shelve your changes, it creates a TransformPreview that would
> revert your changes if applied to your last-committed revision.  It then
> serializes this to a pack-based format.

Hi Aaron,

I've always thought shelf's popularity should mean it was merged in to 
core, but I thought the original shelf was too fragile for this, and
re-writing it to use merge would give us a tool that was really worthy
of core status. Thanks for doing this, and I look forward to the day
when this is merged.

Thanks also to Michael, while shelve isn't perfect it's helped me out
many times and gave us the idea in the first place.

Thanks,

James