Comment 12 for bug 530584

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:41:19 -0000, Andrew Bennetts <email address hidden> wrote:
> So a possible solution might be to have a 'merge-ignore-deletes'
> directive in a bzr-builder recipe? (I'm not proposing that exact
> syntax, just exploring ideas.) It could perform the merge and either
> via a merge_file_content hook or a post-merge introspection of the
> conflicts discard the conflicts due to a delete in the branch being
> merged from. What do you think James?

That would solve this problem, yes.

Obviously it's not ideal that it is an explicit instruction, but aside
from that...

It does have some correctness issues: There are some deletes that would
be considered conflicts. It's rare to actually delete a file in
packaging, but it would still happen from time to time.

I'd obviously like to see a solution that worked from the right end
(somehow), as it's at import time when this files are "removed", but we
don't consider them deletions, just "missing" and welcome to come back
if they like. Even doing this automatically would be a little risky
though, as it's not clear whether the lack of a file in the tarball that
is in the branch is significant or not.

Thanks,

James