merge --preview requires working tree to be clean

[James Westby]

Hi,

merge --preview errors out if the working tree is not clean, when it
shouldn't need it to be clean as it doesn't modify it.

I can see that this may be desirable for two reasons:

  * It makes it more of a --dry-run, show me what would happen if
     I did a merge without doing anything.
  * It doesn't allow you to get confused about whether the target is
     the working tree, or the basis tree, i.e. whether uncommitted changes
     will cause conflicts.

but it has tripped me up enough times that I wanted to file a bug
to get some more opinions.

Thanks,

James

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Can you use --preview --force to get around it? I think you should be
able to. (Which is perhaps just a workaround, and I'm still open to
reconsidering what should happen without --force.)

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

[James Westby (james-w)]

On Fri, 2009-05-01 at 04:17 +0000, Martin Pool wrote:
> Can you use --preview --force to get around it? I think you should be
> able to.

Yes, You can.

Thanks,

James

[Marius Kruger (amanica)]

@James, do you still want it fixed?

Maybe we should leave it as is: If somebody does a preview
and bzr does not complain I would think he would be
surprised later on when he does the actual merge and bzr
starts to complains all of a sunday.
That sounds to me like it would not be an accurate preview any more.