Pushing after merge considered harmful

[Martin Pool]

2010/1/26 Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>:
> Matthew D. Fuller writes:
>
>  > 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).
>
> That reads like an indictment of the Bazaar UI to me.  "There's no
> complete description of the semantics of Bazaar commands, because it
> would be huge and seem full of special cases (and always be
> incomplete, too)."  Since a_r_o affects only a subset of the Bazaar
> UI, you are a fortiori making that broader claim, too.

This option works at the level of the dag model: there is no
per-command implementation.  We explained what effect it has there,
and how the commands map to the dag.  (I think the latter at least
could be far far better in the manual though.).  Explaining the cross
product of every dag-level thing and every ui level thing seems O(n^2)
and just the kind of thing you would criticise us for doing.

>  > The option means to not disturb the mainline.  If that doesn't mean
>  > anything to you,
>
> <snort>  I can't speak for Eli, but I certainly have no trouble
> understanding that.  However, the Moebius strip being one of my
> favorite toys, "append revisions only" sure is a name that does
> nothing for my intuition about the semantics of the option.  Maybe I'm
> just weird, though.

Under what name would you expect to find it?

> Nomenclature aside, I think this ought to be on by default.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>