Re: reversion revulsion [was: log format for vc-bzr]

[Óscar Fuentes]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden> writes:

>    As usual, the Bazaar documentation doesn't say anything
>    about this option that can be grokked by Bazaar non-experts.
>
>        --forget-merges 
>          Remove pending merge marker, without changing any files.
>
>    What is a ``pending merge marker''?  And how removing it
>    resolves the problem at hand?  And if this is the magic wand
>    to leave personal commit comments out of the public
>    repository, then shouldn't we add this to the recommended
>    workflow on the wiki?
>
> I'm concerned that mis- (or any, actually) use of "bzr revert"
> in trunk/ (as opposed to in quickfixes/) will do some damage
> upstream, in the sense that any change that discards (shared)
> history is an ugly mistake.
>
> That's just from a correctness pov.  I dread the performance
> implications of having to do (and possibly screwing up):
>
> cd .../trunk                        # 0
> bzr update                          # 1
> bzr merge ../quickfixes             # 2
> bzr commit                          # 3
> bzr revert --forget-merges          # 4
>
> IIUC step 3 publishes, as does step 4, defeating atomicity.

Nope, you have steps 3 and 4 reversed.

`bzr revert' does not modify committed history. Maybe you are
confusing it with `bzr uncommit', which NEVER should be used in trunk/?

> Really, i would be much happier to see "bzr revert" prohibited
> entirely on <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs>
> or wherever such policy lives, and see local branch history
> suppression effected in step 2 in the merge proper.  That is
> where i want to express "merge quickfixes/ changes, allowing
> manual editing of a new comment (log entry) seeded with the
> log entries of the quickfixes/ changes, but in the end
> *discarding* those log entries".
>
> More succinctly: Can bzr do what "git merge --squash" does?

>From my careless reading of `git help merge', I think that

bzr merge <something>
bzr revert --forget-merges

does that, or something very similar.

-- 
Óscar Fuentes
Desarrollo de Software