Pushing after merge considered harmful

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 06:06:01AM -0500 I heard the voice of
Eli Zaretskii, and lo! it spake thus:
> > From: Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net>
> 
> > It prevents push to change revno for existing revisions in the
> > branch.
> 
> See, that's what confuses me about the description in the docs: a
> "revno" is just a number of a revision.  It is not the revision
> itself.  A revision, AFAIU, is a node in the history DAG.  So why
> are you talking about the revno? do you really mean the revision
> number, or do you mean the revision itself?

Yes, he really means the revision number.  The revision can't change;
that's definitional.  The number can, easily.


    (the following comes across arrogant and dismissive; I can only
    plead that I don't mean it that way, I just can't immediately
    think of a short way to rephrase it to not sound so, and figured
    it was better to say it and hope my assurance is enough to keep it
    from being taken so, than to delete this mail and not contribute
    here)

Trying to describe what the option means for various operations is a
losing game, because the number of possible things you can do is
immense, so the list would be huge and seem full of special cases (and
always be incomplete, too).  It can only be described in terms of what
it means in a bzr sense, which is specific and unitary.  And that
requires that to figure out what it means in any given case, you need
to understand the Bzr Gestalt.  That's certainly out of scope for a
documentation of the option, and I'm sure it's not done well enough in
the docs as a whole (such things never are).

The option means to not disturb the mainline.  If that doesn't mean
anything to you, I can suggest
<http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/MatthewFuller/AboutMainline>, which
is neither concise nor exhaustive, but has helped one or two people
get it.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.