merge vs pull (was What we did at UBZ)

[John A Meinel]

Martin Pool wrote:

> 
>> Right now, bzr help is 13 commands. That's pretty good, and a very, very
>> powerful selling point. I think that its reasonably possible to get that
>> down to ten commands without breaking new minds, by combining three
>> commands -- pull, branch and merge, into one command.
> 
> Well, combining three into one would only get it to 11 commands. :-)
> 
> More importantly, having few commands is not a win if the behaviour of
> those commands is unpredictable.  It's not an end in itself.  It seems
> that a combined pull/merge would be somewhat unpredictable both in
> whether you later need to commit, and in whether it forms a rolled-up
> commit or not.
> 

Well, we could always have "bzr pull" fall back to merge if the branches
have diverged. But that doesn't give us a command for intentionally
merging (like what Robert likes to do).
Also, if we get rid of convergence, so that pulling ends up doing a
switch, that might also be behavior that we need merge for, if someone
doesn't want to change the ancestry of their tree.

I think I will kind of miss having convergence with separate history,
but not terribly. The only use case I can think of is having a release
branch, where it might be nice to indicate convergence, but you have to
have the specific history, because each commit indicates a released
version. But you probably would have to use merge anyway, so it isn't a
big deal.

John
=:->

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