Re: RefTeX Merge

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ralf Angeli writes:

 > I tried to get some information about `brz join' but there does not
 > seem to be much available.  And given the problems with the command
 > discussed on emacs-devel it looks a bit dangerous.

DVCS means never having to say you're sorry.  And I mean *never*.[1]
Remember, all dangerous operations can be conducted on a copy of the
repo.  All it costs is a small amount of disk space for a short period
of time.

 > I'm not yet sure if it would be the right tool for the job because
 > we want to do a merge of files existing in both repositories

This isn't possible in bzr, because bzr tracks "file containers", and
there is no provision for identifying "containers" from repositories
without a common ancestor.  No matter how you slice it, you're going
to get an add-add conflict unless you delete one copy or the other
first.  I can see how to do this in git, but it wouldn't be pleasant
(both ugly and painstaking, but you'd probably end up with a usable
history).

Why do you want to do that, anyway?  What are these files that exist
in both repos?  Do they really have independent lines of development
in both repos?  Or is one a slightly tweaked copy of the other?

 > and the description of `bzr join' talks about combining a tree with
 > a subtree.

Yup.  Seems to me that is what you *should* want to do.  If this falls
afoul of RMS's preference for "sufficient number of files" in a
subtree, fix that *after* the join by bzr-move'ing the files into the
appropriate place.

 > What would be the steps involved?

I can't give specific advice without answers to the questions above.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Well, until you push. ;-)