Workflow problem resulting in useless commit messages

[Andrew King]

Hi everyone,
I am sure I am missing something fairly obvious, but we are having real
issues with our current workflow, and I am sure there must be a way to do it
better than we are currently.

The situation:

We have a mainline called trunk.

We have a number of developers, each using their own branched version of
trunk where they do work, lets say adding feature X.

Lets say I make some progress on the feature, then I commit.

I then try and keep up to date with trunk, because I want to have as few
conflicts as possible in the long term. So, I have to use bzr merge, resolve
conflicts, then commit. Commit message is usually "Merged from trunk".
Repeat this a number of times. I don't use pull, because then I have not
committed my work, and if I get some complicated conflicts that I dont'
resolve correctly the first time, I am in danger of losing my work.

Then, I am done with the feature. I want to push to trunk. I use bzr push.

I now end up with a nested commit tree, where I am responsible for all the
changes that have been done since I started feature X.

ie.

revno something
committer: me
adding feature X.

     revno blah merged from trunk
     committer: me

         revno blah
         committer: someone else

          revno: blah
          committer: yet someone else
          some other feature

    revno blah
    committer: me
    some work on featureX


If I want to avoid this I have to:

do a clean branch of trunk.
bzr branch /path/to/trunk trunk-clean

do diff trunk myBranch

apply the diff to trunk-clean


Which no one ever does.

What are we missing? This has to be a pretty common workflow, but there
doesn't seem to be a clear way to support it.

should we be using bzr send or something instead of push?

should we be using rebase or something?

Cheers,
Andrew
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