syntax to reverse a revision is confusing

[Stuart Langridge]

If I wrongly committed a revision to this branch and I'd like to undo that, I have to remember to specify "." on the end of my merge command.

For example, imagine that in r570 I bzr rm'd a folder, and now (some number of committed revisions later) I realise that I shouldn't have removed it. The logical thing to do would be "bzr merge -r 570..569", but this doesn't work; that unmerges the changes in r570 in the trunk (or whichever branch your current branch is derived from). What I need is "bzr merge -r 570..569 ." (note the terminal ".")

This confused me for some time!

While it's obviously necessary to be able to unmerge revisions from your parent branch, I suggest that unmerging revisions from your own branch is likely to be quite common, so perhaps a warning saying "you didn't specify a branch, so this uses trunk, not your current branch" or similar might be useful.

Bazaar (bzr) 1.10

[James Westby (james-w)]

On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 09:37 +0000, Stuart Langridge wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> If I wrongly committed a revision to this branch and I'd like to undo
> that, I have to remember to specify "." on the end of my merge command.
>
> For example, imagine that in r570 I bzr rm'd a folder, and now (some
> number of committed revisions later) I realise that I shouldn't have
> removed it. The logical thing to do would be "bzr merge -r 570..569",
> but this doesn't work; that unmerges the changes in r570 in the trunk
> (or whichever branch your current branch is derived from). What I need
> is "bzr merge -r 570..569 ." (note the terminal ".")
>
> This confused me for some time!
>
> While it's obviously necessary to be able to unmerge revisions from your
> parent branch, I suggest that unmerging revisions from your own branch
> is likely to be quite common, so perhaps a warning saying "you didn't
> specify a branch, so this uses trunk, not your current branch" or
> similar might be useful.

EYOUAREABITSTUPIDBUTITISEASYTOMISSTHEDOT :-)

It would be possible to make specifying the branch mandatory when
reverse merging. It's a rare enough operation anyway, and I imagine
using the remembered merge location is even rarer.

Thanks,

James

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

I have gotten this wrong a few times too, so I think it's worth changing the UI.