Workflow problem resulting in useless commit messages

[Talden]

> Perhaps the ideal thing would be having a concept within bzr of 'minor
> revisions' or something that don't show up at the same level in the log
> as your primary changes; maybe just a log formatter option to more
> briefly summarize the merged revisions that you consider to be minor.

Well those 'minor' commits are important if conflict resolution or a
broken merge algorithm toasted the code.

I don't see a solution for a bad merge but conflict resolution could
be separated from merged content in a commit so that it makes conflict
resolution more obvious - however such a feature could be quite
complicated and doesn't really help that much.

An alternative might be to break up the workflow using a local mirror

Remote branch -> Local Mirror -> Your branch

1. note local mirror rev#
2. pull into mirror
3. note changes between rev# and tip of mirror

If those changes don't affect your changes don't merge to the branch.
If they do then merge/resolve/commit. This commit has real meaning so
having it in the log is important anyway.

You might still end up with some merges you could have avoided but it
should let you avoid some merge effort and log noise.

--
Talden