Will re-basing support be added into Bazaar core ?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Andrew Bennetts writes:
 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > Andrew Bennetts writes:
 > > 
 > >  > Second, it creates a history that you never actually had.
 > > 
 > > So do the manipulations performed by looms and friends.
 > 
 > No, looms do not modify or discard any history.

Reread what *you* wrote: "create".  As I responded to David, any
feminist will tell you that the fact that history isn't recorded
doesn't mean it didn't happen.

To unpack that, a loom (stack, quilt, or queue) allows you to very
flexibly modify working trees automatically according to a history-
conforming framework (up to patch application conflicts, which are the
same as merge conflicts), just as rebase does.  The only difference is
that it doesn't record that creation in the VCS history.  You still
did it, though, and it is history in that sense.

The question of to what extent traversing a "parallel" path in the
tree DAG (the "static" DAG which has all trees as nodes and formally
links them by the process of "arbitrary edit") corresponds to
traversing the "same" path in the commit history DAG is a very
delicate question.  Bzr (and other branch-is-working-tree-oriented
VCSes) encourages the point of view that history is an object reified
in the working directory.  Darcs (and other recombinant patch systems
like looms) tend to deprecate the idea of "history" entirely, except
as an accidental, mostly arbitrary sequencer for patches.  Git is
somewhere in the middle.