Comment 1 for bug 402196

I can see why you'd want this in this case, and it's a reasonable case, but it's not a bug so much as a misunderstanding of bzr.

bzr --keep really means "keep in the working tree but delete from bzr". The results in terms of what's committed are the same whether you use --keep or not. Possibly this should be made more clear in the documentation or help, with eg

            keep='Delete from bzr but leave the working copy.',

Would that have made it more clear?

It would be a separate feature request to have a way to update a tree without deleting files.

For now I suggest you in the updated tree use 'bzr revert' to extract the wanted revision of the configuration file...