Cross-project merges

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Tue, 2010-06-22 at 15:00 +1000, Andrew Bennetts wrote:
> Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> [...]
> > > (I do wonder if there's a better name than "merge-into" though... there's some
> > > overlap with "join" I guess.)
> > Yeah, I was wondering about that. How is merge-into different from join
> > and do we really need to have both in the core?
> First, there's the trivial: join doesn't work with 2a either, for
> similar reasons to why merge-into doesn't work.  (It expects to be able
> to mutate inventory._byid).
Is this really still an issue, big enough to warrant putting a command
in core rather than keeping it in a plugin?

> Second, join works in terms of trees on disk.  You can't use join with a
> remote branch the way you can use merge.
This seems fixable without adding another command but just by adding the
proper support for it in join.

> Third, join works with whole trees, but there are use cases for partial
> merge-intos (somewhat like there are uses for partial merges).  The main
> one I have in mind is to incorporate just the debian/ subdirectory of
> one branch into another that doesn't have one (even if the branches are
> unrelated according to bzr's history of them, due to parallel imports).
As far as I know join only works with partial merge-into's, I've never
used it for merging two trees at the root level. I've used it for
situations like putting a larstiq-y debian directory into another
project and having a copy of an external library live in a dependency.

> I think ideally join and merge-into (or whatever is called in the end)
> would share much of their implementation internally.  As for UI... well,
> as I've already said, I'm not sure :)  Starting with the UI from the
> merge-into plugin seems like an ok first step, but *perhaps* the join
> command should provide this functionality instead of a new command?
They could/should share the implementation, and I also think (to avoid
confusion) there is no need for more than one UI.

Cheers,

Jelmer

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