Pushing after merge considered harmful

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 12:04:21AM +0900 I heard the voice of
Stephen J. Turnbull, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> That reads like an indictment of the Bazaar UI to me.

It's an indictment of any non-trivial system.  There's always
emergent behavior, and to try and pass understanding along from the
top down is like trying to keep somebody alive by feeding them carbon
atoms.  Armed with the underlying understanding, it's very easy to ask
yourself "does operation X involved changing the branch pointer", and
so figure out whether the param can mean anything.

Asking after it the other way around basically boils down to "explain
what $X is doing without having to understand what $X does".  Trying
to do that means ANYTHING ends up being a bunch of independent special
cases, which is impossible to learn, and impossible to extrapolate
from.  It's an annoyance I fight against continually professionally,
and it's one of my pet peeves in bzr support.

Trying to pass information along as that bunch of special cases is
doomed to failure, and it can't help BUT frustrate people, who'll take
it as meaning the tool itself is a pile of cobbled-up special cases,
when it's nothing of the sort.  While there ARE unfortunately some
ugly special cases in bzr (the bound/checkout thing being high on the
list), MOST of the behavior is Obvious(tm) from the interaction of the
rather few underlying pieces.


-- 
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.