Will re-basing support be added into Bazaar core ?

[David Timothy Strauss]

----- "Russel Winder" <russel.winder at concertant.com> wrote:

> Perhaps this is where things get interesting.  I want to be able to
> push to the mainline from the feature branch.  If I have to prepare a
> patch then hasn't failure of the DVCS to give me the tools I need occurred?

You do not have to prepare a patch to merge into the mainline. You simply perform a standard merge. I think there's still confusion here, so I'll clarify.

It seems that people are using rebase to achieve two goals:
(a) Keep a feature branch ready to merge into the mainline without conflicts.
(b) Allow easy human evaluation of changes the feature branch will make if merged into the mainline.

For (a), I'm arguing one should periodically merge from the mainline into the feature branch. For (b), I'm arguing one should use "bzr diff --old=[mainline]" or "bzr send" to render the changes in a unified, overall "here's what this feature branch does to the mainline" sort of way.

When it's time to merge the feature into the mainline, the mainline maintainer either merges from the feature branch directly or merges using a merge directive prepared from the feature branch. (These two workflows create identical results in Bazaar, but I'm mentioning them for completeness.) Both options pull the full feature branch history into the mainline for later inspection.

The most streamlined workflow for the above in Bazaar is to use merge directives (created using "bzr send"). A merge directive simultaneously provides a human-readable summary of what merging the feature branch will do to the mainline *and* all the actual revision data from the feature branch in binary form to actually perform the merge into the mainline.

-- 
David Strauss
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