merge --pull behavior (was bzr-svn 1.0)

[Aaron Bentley]

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John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> Aaron Bentley wrote: 
>> spiv and I have been thinking of changing merge --pull so that it only
>> pulls when the old tip is in the lefthand ancestry, and I think it's the
>> sort of change that might make sense everywhere.

> Just to mention that it is probably *not* the behavior that people who
> pushed so hard for 'merge --pull' care about. The whole point was that
> they wanted git's style of 'fastforward if possible' and wanted to
> ignore stuff like lefthand ancestry importance.

True, but this may mean they just misunderstand Bazaar's model.  I think
we have not given a lot of thought to merge --pull, because it's only
there because users demanded it.  We can provide a means to get the old
behavior, but I think it should spell out the consequences.  Like "bzr
merge --pull-renumber".

We may find that merge --pull-renumber is not nearly as popular as
they'd lead us to think.

> Personally, I think that sort of thing is nice, though.

I think that if we change merge --pull so that it does not throw away
the local view of history, it will become something we can recommend to
everyone.  I could even imagine making it my default.

When I had separate work and home computers, I worked like that all the
time.  My work and home copies of bzrtools trunk were intended to be
mirrors, but they'd occasionally get out of sync.  I would pull to
update them, and merge if they happened to diverge.

The actual reason spiv and I were talking about this is that in a nested
tree, you'll probably have some subbranches that are diverged and some
that are mirrors.  It would be nice to use a recursive "merge --pull" to
update the tree, so that the mirrors are pulled and the trees of
diverged branches are merged.

Aaron
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