When manually resolving directory conflicts isn't a feature

[Mary Gardiner]

I wanted to raise this here rather than filing bugs as I have a suspicion
they'd be marked invalid-that's-a-feature like bug 102001.

I use Bazaar in what is probably currently an unusual way: I use it to manage a
lot of LaTeX files related to my PhD. This means I create new directories a lot
more than coders do: a new directory for each document. Sometimes I foolishly
don't do this inside a designated trunk branch.

Then I end up in this situation, or something like it:

I'm currently working on two documents in two branches doc-1 and doc-2. Each
contains a new directory not in the other branch. Then switching between them
is an utter pain in the neck, because instead of:

 1. work on doc-1
 2. send to someone for comment
 3. while waiting on comment, bzr switch to doc-2, work on that

I have

 1. work on doc-1
 2. send to someone for comment
 3. while waiting on comment, bzr switch to doc-2
 4. encounter conflicts: "can't delete doc-1 because it is not empty.  Not
    deleting" (LaTeX leaves a bunch of droppings behind it that I am not
    versioning, typically a .log file and a .aux file at the very least)

    Sometimes these aren't the only conflicts either, as we shall see.

 5. delete doc-1 manually
 6. run "bzr resolve doc-1" (this is more of a pain in the neck than it sounds,
    since I've just deleted it and therefore tab completion on it is unavailable:
    some of these are 5 dirs deep by now, so I have to copy and paste the path
    from "bzr st")
 6b. not atypically, spend 15 minutes letting Andrew Bennetts review my
     working directory to make sure it's consistent[1]
 6c. not atypically, spend 30 minutes filing a bug against Bazaar[1]
 7. work on doc-2

While I realise it's an important feature to never have Bazaar delete files
that it doesn't know about, this workflow is really annoying. What should I do?

-Mary

[1] This might sound extreme, but today's was
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/355964 which did involve about 60 minutes
of trying to work out what the hell happened and how to fix my working tree so
that I can get some work done. Not finished yet.