Feedback on merging via bzr

[Andrew Bennetts]

David Strauss wrote:
> On 2010-01-18 03:45, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > Text conflict in debian/changelog
> > 1 conflicts encountered.
> > The merge resulted in 1 conflicts. Please resolve these and commit the changes 
> > with "bzr commit".
> > 
> > This gives me the proposed merge.  The conflict in this case seems to occur 
> > with every merge I try.  The most recent Debian and Ubuntu debian/changelog 
[...]
> 
> At least for the changelog issue, Bazaar is moving forward with per-file
> conflict resolution hooks that will allow type-specific merge behavior
> for things like changelogs.

That's right.  If you're interested, bug 491711
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/491711> is tracking progress on this,
and there's a branch at adds the hook point going through code review at the
moment.  Perhaps there should be a bzr-builddeb bug (or bug task on 491711?)
too?  Using that hook point I've successfully written a custom merge for
bzr's NEWS file, so it should be suitable for debian/changelog files too.

I'm about to go on paternity leave, but many bzr devs will sprinting
together next week.  I've suggested they take a look at creating a custom
merge for debian/changelog files; considering there's some code already
written for doing 2-way merges of that file (see
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-distributed-devel/2010-January/000357.html>)
it shouldn't be too hard.

-Andrew.