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

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org>]

() Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
() Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:00:15 +0200

   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.

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?

thi