Please stop adding [merge] to log lines

[Andrew Cowie]

For some reasons the Bazaar version we just upgraded to (1.13.1) has started adding "[merge]" to the first lines of the commit messages it displays when listing revisions when doing commands like `missing --line` and `log --line`.

This is highly annoying. If we wanted the revision summaries to have the text "[merge]" in them we would have added it in the first place.

I have no doubt that someone thought that this would be a good idea, but

a) it should be disabled by default (a tool like Bazaar should not be doing things that have not been explicitly asked of it, especially with respect to user experience), and

b) if someone wants it enabled they should either specify a command line switch like --show-extra-information-about-which-revisions-are-meges-even-though-it-is-blindingly-obvious or have a global setting in ~/.bazaar/bazaar.conf to turn it on.

Or you could just wholesale remove this. That would work too.

AfC

[Ian Clatworthy (ian-clatworthy)]

So there's at least two issues here:

1. Whether we ought to be showing which revisions are merges
2. If so, what the indicator should be.

It isn't always obvious what revisions are merges and we're trying to avoid hiding information without telling users that we're doing so. So *I* feel we need an indicator of some kind somewhere in the info displayed.

We picked [merge] in the line format for consistency with the short (and now long) format. It doesn't need to be so verbose though and it doesn't need to go where it is. Would a simple [m] at the end of the line be better?

BTW, you may be interested in a patch to tweak the long & short formats. See http://bundlebuggy.aaronbentley.com/project/bzr/request/%3C49D22FB8.1000402%40internode.on.net%3E. If we use an indicator like '*', then we probably ought to extend the user advice to line format as well.

Finally, missing and other commands will one day gain many of the options recently added to log. They haven't been forgotten - they just aren't top of the list for me right now.