[MERGE] Exception when pulling from a location

[Aaron Bentley]

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John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> Aaron Bentley wrote:
>> John Arbash Meinel wrote:
>> > nitpick: (aka bundle or merge directive)

> True, though I almost always call merge directives bundles because MD is
> very unwieldy to actually use in conversation.

Well, if I could have said "bundle" accurately, I wouldn't have said
"mergeable". :-)

>> Why is one backwards and the other not?
> 
> 
> Because the former will try to read from a directory, and is the
> uncommon case. It also causes problems with HTTP servers that don't
> support index listings, or cause redirections (like trying to GET
> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~foo/bar/baz/ will try to redirect you to
> .../~foo/bar/baz/changes because that is what a web-browser should see.)

We still need to handle those cases properly for the merge case, so can
you be more specific?

>> In the case where the specified file is versioned, and is a merge
>> directive, should merge treat it as a versioned file, or as a merge
>> directive?

> Versioning your merge directives is certainly an edge case that we could
> support either way, or allow an explicit flag for what we want to do
> with them.
> I think doing a partial merge of a versioned merge directive is an even
> further edge case, so I would officially say it should act as though the
> MD wasn't versioned at all.

When I'm trying to decide correct behavior in the general case, I often
examine edge cases.  I agree that a versioned mergeable should behave
like a mergeable, not a versioned file, so I made merge try using it as
a mergeable first.  And once I had determined it for merge, I made pull
consistent.

> In fact, the case I would originally try to handle is:
> 
>   bzr send -o foo.patch
>   cd ../other
>   bzr merge ../orig/foo.patch
> 
> In this case "foo.patch" isn't versioned, but happens to be inside a
> versioned directory.
> 
> Still, for 'bzr pull' I think it makes the most sense to try as a
> Branch.open() first, because it is unambiguous. I can respect that we
> have a harder time with "bzr merge", though it would be nice to not get
> redirect errors.
> 
> Perhaps we could change the "read_mergeable_from_url" code to never
> follow redirects? 

Possibly.  I don't yet understand why we would need to, though.

> Or is that something people are going to want? (IMO
> merge-directives are meant to be ephemeral, and not something that you
> are going to go through the effort of setting up a redirect for.)

No, but there are sites that have generic redirects, like
www.example.com -> example.com.  It's also conceivable that someone
would use tinyurl with merge directives.

Aaron
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