[Monotone-devel] Automerging

[William Uther]

Hi all,

  I thought I'd throw out another wacky idea...  I've been mulling  
this one for a while, but a post by Stéphane Gimenez in the Branches  
in git and monotone was close enough that I thought I'd bring it up...

  There are a number of situations where I have local patches to a  
program.  I'm also actively developing that program.  And my local  
patches are not acceptable upstream.

  As things stand it is annoying to develop in this situation.

  Option i) I could just leave my patches uncommitted locally.  I  
only commit the things I want to go upstream.  This is annoying  
because I keep accidentally committing my local changes, or having to  
do work to separate the local changes out before committing.

  Option ii) I could start a new branch for my own version of the  
code, develop on the main branch, and propagate the changes across.   
This means I don't get to develop with my local changes (which is  
both a positive and a negative).  It also means I have to keep  
propagating.

  Option iii) I could again start a new branch, develop on it, and  
"pluck" changes back to the mainline.  This leads to problems when I  
propagate back from the mainline in future.

What I'm after is something that makes this easy.  I can imagine a  
number of different approaches, and I'm not sure which is the most  
monotonic one:

  Change i) Stéphane's idea of a multiple checkout.  I make a branch  
for my local changes.  I then do a multiple checkout of my branch and  
the trunk.  The auto-merging means I get the best of both worlds.   
Committing is interesting.  (You'd have to take the diffs against the  
auto-merged branch, use OT theory to move that patch back before the  
auto-merge, and then commit.  That shouldn't be too bad as you can  
always complain to the user.)

  Change ii) Full DARCS style handling of changesets :P.  I just  
don't send in the changeset for my local patches.

  Change iii) A "local branch" quilt-like system (like mercurial?).

  Change iv) Add an "auto-propagate" ability that propagates any new  
revs on one branch onto a second one.  This gets "interesting" if  
there are multiple heads about.

  Change v) I change my mind about wanting this feature :).

Be well,

Will           :-}