Answering questions from Emacs developers.

[Andrew Cowie]

On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 19:08 -0300, Martin Albisetti wrote: 
> That's correct. The merge commit is an extra commit. It may or may not
> have changed anything, but it's an extra revision.

For what it's worth, it took me a *really* long time to get over the
fact that this "doesn't matter"

If you can educate your users to just:

        a) ignore merge commits (and to therefore "not worry about when
        to merge ... merge from 'mainline' and merge from others and
        from other branches of your own quite freely"
        
        b) not to be too obsessed with what is in any one commit says,
        and
        
        c) care very much about what
        
                $ bzr gdiff -r ancestor:../mainline

        says,

then I think you'll find that things go better. Teaching people (c)
really is what matters, because "that's the patch you're submitting", at
which point you stop caring about (a) and (b).

This was a long road for me, because one obsesses about merges revisions
and commit messages so long as you're seeing them, which is what `bzr
viz` and `bzr gannotate` are so busy telling you, and when first
learning DVCS these visualizations seem important. Perhaps they're not,
after all, hence (c).



AfC
Sydney



P.S. I'm not at all convinced that Bazaar supports open source workflow
very well; John's feature branch blog post[1] × Robert telling me much
the same all this time convinces me that there's something horribly
wrong if that's what we have to jump through just to manage moving diffs
around [you know, Theory of Patches {ahem} and what Havoc said all those
years ago about what we actually need to support _open source_ :)] ...
But that's another topic. Bazaar _does_ allow you to do what you need to
do, no question. It's just really easy to shoot yourself in the
foot. :( I mean, is this really the best we can do for a user experience
for this workflow?
[1] http://jam-bazaar.blogspot.com/2009/10/refactoring-work-for-review-and-keep.html


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20091202/80c6d065/attachment.pgp