Conflicts in removed files

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Aaron Bentley writes:
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 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > The problem here is that to the extent that we know what he wants,
 > > too, bzr should just do it.  But when we don't, we should ask.
 > 
 > The literal interpretation of "ask" would be interactivity,

Yes, it would, but I should have been more careful.  In fact I agree
with you, maybe for different reasons.  Conflicts are too complex to
guess what the user wants, and often too complex to formulate good
yes/no or multiple choice questions about what he wants.

 > The idea was always that *after* the merge (or other
 > transformation) had taken place, tools could query the conflicts
 > and let the user decide how to resolve them.  Unfortunately, no one
 > has stepped up to write such tools.

I think that is just very hard, at least once you get past the
primitive (but useful!) level of git rerere.  I thought that Bazaar
either was a little smarter than git about those things, or perhaps
allowed the user to work smarter, but Stefan's example seems to show
that it's still easy to construct realistic scenarios where rerere
could be useful in Bazaar too.  Maybe that's the place to start.