Pushing after merge considered harmful

[Joseph Wakeling]

Guy Gascoigne-Piggford wrote:
> I wonder how much of this is just due to different expectations.
>  Distributed seems to come with the implication that all branches are
> equal, but the reality is that I've never worked anywhere where this is
> actually the case.  There's a hierarchy of some kind and somewhere
> there's a master, whether it's the corporate mirror that's backed up off
> site, or the main SCM build repository or whatever, some branches have
> more weight than others.  People don't take kindly to them changing in
> seemingly odd ways.

This is where one needs to emphasise strongly Linus Torvalds' very good
point in his 'tech talk' on git: in DCVS, the definition of 'mainline',
or of a hierarchy of branch importance, is a _social_ decision, not a
technical one.

Consequently, that means that people have to take a heightened social
responsibility for preserving such a branch hierarchy if they want it.

Re the suggestion that append-revisions-only be the default option --
and speaking as a mostly casual user who uses bzr for personal and
generally not shared projects, but who knows bzr's workings well enough
not to make the push-after-merge mistake -- I would probably find it an
irritation, but I think it would be OK so long as any attempt to perform
a command blocked by the option generated an informative error message
regarding (i) how to preserve the block and send the changes you want to
the other branch and (ii) how to remove the block from the branch if you
prefer to (with warning about risks, of course:-)

Best wishes,

    -- Joe