Bazaar should cleanly handle added files that are identical to existing unversioned files

[Mark Shuttleworth]

I saw this today:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 mark mark 32 2007-03-08 06:48 mechanize -> ../sourcecode/zope/src/mechanize
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mark mark 32 2007-03-03 15:16 mechanize.moved -> ../sourcecode/zope/src/mechanize

the backstory is that I needed to add that symlink to make things work on Feisty so I did, but left it unversioned then someone added an identical symlink to the tree when i merged, i got a conflict. i would understand that if the unversioned symlink I added was different to the new, versioned one, but in fact they are identical.
imo this should "Just Work" - bzr should see the added symlink is identical to the unversioned one there, and "merge cleanly"

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

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Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

> the backstory is that I needed to add that symlink to make things work on Feisty so I did, but left it unversioned then someone added an identical symlink to the tree when i merged, i got a conflict. i would understand that if the unversioned symlink I added was different to the new, versioned one, but in fact they are identical.
> imo this should "Just Work" - bzr should see the added symlink is identical to the unversioned one there, and "merge cleanly"

This is certainly possible in principle. It probably requires a new way
to get the SHA1 or symlink target of mechanize, i.e.
TreeTransorm.get_content_hash()

We should also consider whether reverting in your scenario should delete
the symlink, and, if not, how to prevent it.

Aaron
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[Stefan Monnier (monnier)]

Actually we could generalize this idea and do a 2-way merge: if the two files are identical, it behaves as the OP wants, and otherwise you get a new file with some conflicts.
It may not always be a good idea, but at least in my use case, it would DTRT in 99% of the cases since conflicts between new versioned files and pre-existing unversioned files are almost always due to a change where a file becomes versioned.

[Torsten Bronger (bronger)]

What about the case if both files are versioned? I merged an SVN branch into an identical Bazaar branch and got tons of conflicts. I think such conflicts should be handled automatically as well.