Handling unmergeable files -- a call to arms

[Martin Pool]

2009/5/29 Paul Schauble <Paul.Schauble at ticketmaster.com>:
> I don't think 4 works. There may be hundreds of Bazaar repositories that
> contain the file, many of which are currently unreachable by network.
> For a lock to work it would have to lock every single one of these
> repositories. And you can't do it.

Whether 4 (sending email) works or not really depends on the team.
For small teams who're closely in contact, saying "don't touch foo,
I'm using it" may work.  If there are hundreds of developers it will
not scale.  Even in Clearcase which explicitly supports locking it
becomes complicated.

> I think the best that can be done in this case is to keep all of the
> conflicting versions of the file in the repositories as they are updated
> and to note the conflict as requiring human intervention. This doesn't
> necessarily leave you merging by eye. A lot of work processors and
> graphics programs have merge features. But Bazaar can't do it.

Well, Bazaar can't do it alone, but it can do it.  You're left with a
conflict, and copies of the files on either side.  Run the
wordprocessor's merge function on the THIS and OTHER copies, then mark
them resolved and commit.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>