Terminology for referring to branches during merges and conflicts (was: [RFC] How to better assist users in resolving conflicts)

[Andrew Bennetts]

Gordon Tyler wrote:
[...]
> However, a thought just occurred to me, why don't we use branch nicks?

Hmm, I thought there was already a bug about that, but I can't find it
at the moment.

I'm not sure if branch nicks would work well as filename suffixes, but
they certainly would be helpful as part of the conflict markers, e.g.

<<<<<<< TREE (bug-1234)
foo
bar
||||||| BASE-REVISION
frob
=======
baz
qux
>>>>>>> MERGE-SOURCE (bzr.dev)

I think a patch for that would be welcomed.  IIRC the reason it hasn't
been done already is that it was rather awkward to pass that information
into the merge code, but I'm sure that can be overcome.

I guess it'd be good if the inline conflict region labels matched the
file suffixes too.  It doesn't help user confusion for the inline
markers to use TREE/BASE-REVISION/MERGE-SOURCE, while the suffixes are
THIS/BASE/OTHER.

-Andrew.