Terminology for referring to branches during merges and conflicts

[Ben Finney]

Vincent Ladeuil <v.ladeuil+lp at free.fr> writes:

> >>>>> "Ben" == Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> writes:
>
>     Ben> Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> writes:

(Vincent, as a side note: could you please set your quoting leader to
the conventional ‘> ’ instead of these obtrusive leaders? I usually find
myself skipping over your messages as too much effort to parse through
the quoted material.)

> Note that it's used in 'bzr missing' too.

Right. I would be arguing, then, for the documentation and interface to
consistently drop this “mine”/“theirs” terminology.

>     Ben> I forgot the case where the terminology is pathological:
>     Ben> I often am dealing with a merge where “this” ==
>     Ben> “theirs”, and “other” == “mine”.  Yet the terms used by
>     Ben> Bazaar are opposite to that. 
>
> If conflicts are generated you mentally translate '.THIS' suffix
> to 'theirs' and .OTHER to 'mine'.
>
> Whereas when you merge other people work into yours you know that
> '.THIS' is 'mine' and '.OTHER' is 'theirs'.

That's the problem: The resulting mental mapping doesn't match what
Bazaar claims for “mine” and “theirs”. Especially when “this branch” is
*not* mine, and “the other branch” *is* mine.

The “this”/“other” terminology doesn't have that problem — in the
contexts being discussed, they are unambiguous references since the
operations are always performed “in this branch” and comparing to “the
other branch” — so I think that terminology should be consistently and
exclusively used for the relative branch references in such operations.

> Another reason to use this/other is that we use '.THIS' and '.OTHER'
> suffixes (as used above in the discussion :)

Yes.

> Then there is keep/take or just take or even nothing: 
>
> 1) --keep-this/--take-other,
> 2) --take-this/--take-other
> 3) --this, --other

You've lost me with this part. Is there some particular command you're
positing options for?

-- 
 \        “You can't have everything; where would you put it?” —Steven |
  `\                                                            Wright |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney