Merging Branches with Binaries

[John Arbash Meinel]

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A. S. Budden wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> We've been experimenting with merging a bit over the last couple of
> days and we've been finding it slightly difficult to do.  I thought
> I'd share my experiences in the hope that someone can tell me what I'm
> doing wrong.
> 
...

> As an example of the process, we open a (heavyweight) checkout of the
> trunk and click "Merge" in Bazaar Explorer.  We select br1 on the
> server and the changes are pulled in.  In the process, there are one
> or more text conflicts and the "contents conflict".  Out.axf is
> deleted and Out.axf.BASE, Out.axf.THIS and Out.axf.OTHER appear.
> 
> A message then pops up in Bazaar Explorer saying:
> 
>     bzr:ERROR: No such file:
>     u'z:/path/to/Out.axf'
>     [IGNORE], [CLOSE]

This sounds like a bug in bzr-explorer or qbzr, which may be fixed in
2.1.0 (once we sort out the installer issues). You may want to check:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/qbzr
and/or
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr-explorer


...

> We've various random ways of sorting this out, including trying to
> revert that file (after making sure that Out.axf exists so that it
> doesn't crash), which reverts the ENTIRE merge, despite having only
> selected the one file in qrevert.  We have yet to find a good way to
> solve this.

This also reminds me of a bug report that I think was fixed recently.

> 
> What we'd really like is to be able to just right click on the
> "contents conflict" line in the Conflict dialog box and select "Choose
> THIS" or "Choose OTHER" and everything else to happen by magic.  Of
> course, what we'd like even more is to configure it to automatically
> just pick "THIS" for Output/*/*.axf, but that's probably asking too
> much.  What would be REALLY clever would be a means of picking the
> build number file that has the highest version number, but perhaps
> that's a bit of pipe dream!
> 
> Please can anyone offer any suggestions as to what we're doing wrong?
> 
> Many thanks in advance,
> 
> Al

With bzr 2.1.0+ you can create a per-file merge plugin, that checks for
any file ending in .axf and just always selects OTHER.

John
=:->

PS> Note that we are currently sorting out:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr-explorer/+bug/524162

Where explorer isn't getting packaged correctly in the 2.1.0-1 release.
The current workaround is probably to install the all-in-one installer,
and then separately run the bzr-explorer installer.
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