bzr merge quilt handling unapplies patches unnecessarily on 'bzr pull'

[Steve Langasek]

Updating my local copy of a UDD branch which was one revision out of date:

$ bzr pull
Using saved parent location: bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/%2Bbranch/debian/nfs-utils/
Most recent Debian version: MISSING
Unapplying quilt patches to prevent spurious conflicts
[...]

This is a pull, so there's no reason to unapply the quilt patches.

[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

This is actually a merge too, as far as the working tree is concerned. Your working tree can have pending changes and bzr merges in the changes between the last branch revision and the new branch revision.

We could optimize the case where there are no working tree changes, though.

[Forest Bond (forest-bond)]

As a user, this behavior is really quite surprising in a variety of cases. My use case is "unshelve". I had shelved some changes that I wanted to put in a quilt patch, but when I tried to "bzr unshelve && quilt refresh" things didn't go so well. In fact, my changes were then mixed with the changes introduced by unapplying my full patch set.

I would think there would at least be a way to disable this behavior? Or maybe the user should be asked if he wants his source tree messed with like this?