Re: Latest merge from the emacs-23 branch

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 08:47:18 -0500
> 
> In practice the list tends to be reasonably short (since it only
> includes things like backports plus a few changes that are already
> overridden on the trunk, like changing the release number).  So we could
> probably include it, tho it's more work.  Currently, the output that my
> script gets doesn't mention revision ids, only revision numbers and log
> messages, so maybe we could just include the first line of commit
> messages instead of revision ids.

That'd be good, thanks.

> > how can I distinguish between this case and the case of
> > erroneously merging from the branch (which happened in the past)?
> 
> By looking at the code.

You mean, I need to give up using "bzr diff" (or the corresponding VC
commands), which AFAIK are based on the history metadata, and instead
use "bzr cat" on each one of two (or 3) revisions, then run Diff on
them?  That'd be a major inconvenience.

> Even with more metadata, only the code can tell
> you what was actually changed since the metadata can only tell you what
> bzr commands were used (and even that only to a limited extent since my
> script uses various ways to cheat around bzr's limitations), but not how
> conflicts were resolved manually or what extra manual changes
> were performed.

If we cheat Bazaar too much, we will eventually cheat ourselves,
because output of a "cheated" tool cannot be trusted.