Conflicts in removed files

[Algis Kabaila]

On Friday 11 December 2009 04:28:45 Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I keep getting annoyed by conflicts in files I don't care about and am
> wondering how can I tell Bazaar to just bother me with those:
I assume that in the above line you meant to say "just don't bother me"?

I apologise for what seems picking on spelling, as it is not - I am genuinely 
concerned with what you report, as I had very little experience in bazaar.  In 
svn I found that deletion of files outside of version control led to chaos.  
What you describe here under bzr seems to be worse than svn. 
>
> Basically the situation is as follows:
> - take an upstream repository with some files you don't want.
> - in your own branch, do "bzr rm filesIdontwant; bzr commit".
> - from then on, every time you "bzr merge" and those files have been
>   modified upstream, Bazaar will complain about conflicts in those files.
Can this behaviou be simmulated locally?  I expect that it should be.  

I have a personal interest: I am developing all by myself a pet project that 
keeps me "off the streets" ("easmy"), with Launchpad used as an external 
repository.  Basically for safe storage.

I have just overhauled the whole project, deleting many unwanted files.  So if 
I push that new setup to the existing repository, I will get a series of 
persistent pesky conflicts?  If that is really the case and there is no 
convenient work around that spells disaster for application of bazaar to many 
initiatives.

> I understand that these are real conflicts and that depending on the
> reason why I removed those files, I may very much want to know about
> those conflicts so I can merge the changes into some other place (for
> example), say if I removed "foo.c" because I reimplemented the
> functionality from scratch in some other file.
It seems to me that this is exactly what I have done in my current project on 
a working 'feature' branch where I have committed  locally to that 'feature' 
branch without conflicts.

How can I ensure that I don't get into a mess of spurious conflicts when I 
merge that to the "main line" branch?

Can you enlighten me? 

What I thin of, after reading about your experience, is to copy locally my 
"main branch to a "test" location on my hdd.  Then deal similarly with my 
'feature branch' and start experimenting merging.

FWIIW, I think that such persistent spurious conflicts would kill *my* wish to 
preference to bzr as a vcs tool.
>
> But in many cases, I removed the file because I really don't care and
> don't want to see its content, neither now nor in the future.  So, I'd
> like to be able to tell Bzr about it so it doesn't keep pestering me
> with those spurious conflicts which I always have to resolve by hand.
>
This is very disturbing indeed.  I am very slow for obvious reasons, but I 
will try to simmulate your problem by hand and will come back to this thread a 
little later.

Thanks for pointing out what seems to me a "killer" problem - just as the bzr-
explorer is a "killer" application (killer -- or puller in the opposite 
direction  :)  )

> Of course, you'll say that such a case should never occur since such
> files should never be under Bzr's control, but life is often different
> from what it should and what we'd like it to be, and we don't always
> have control over it.
I do share your sentiment, if that is what "they" will say!

> So, does Bzr offer some way to say
>
>    bzr rm --really-no-conflicts-please filesIdontwant
>
> -- Stefan

OldAl.
-- 
Algis Kabaila, MEngSc, PhD(Eng)
http://akabaila.pcug.org.au/StructuralAnalysis.pdf