Re: RefTeX Merge

[Stefan Monnier]

> 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.

Here's how it could work:

   bzr co .../emacs/trunk
   cd trunk/lisp/textmodes
   bzr co .../reftex/trunk reftex
   bzr join reftex
   bzr mv reftex/foo bar
   bzr mv ...
   bzr rm reftex
   bzr commit locally
   make sure the resulting repository works right

Just make sure the reftex bzr tree hasn't gone through a "bzr-git"
translation because otherwise the resulting branch may trigger a bug in
bzr when you later checkout a new copy of that branch (at least that
seems to be the problem we bumped into in the `elpa' branch).

"bzr join" has worked reliably for me as long as I didn't try to join
a repository converted by the bzr-git plugin.  But I suspect that bzr-hg
might trigger the same problems.
   
> Also, 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 and the
> description of `bzr join' talks about combining a tree with a subtree.

Indeed, the above leads to having two copies of the reftex files, so you
have to choose between the two and Bazaar won't know that they were really
the same files.  So it's not necessarily the best solution, depending on
which history you want to keep and how important it is to preserve it
directly in the Emacs repository's metadata (as opposed to just as
a ChangeLog file or a commit log text).


        Stefan