Re: Octopus merge: unique (?) to git, but is it useful?

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 3, 2008, 11:27 UTC
Message-ID: <200806031327.52175.jnareb@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <vpqabi2zvci.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>

On Tue, 3 June 2008, Matthieu Moy wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> I think that octopus merge (merge with more than two parents/legs) is 
>> feature which is unique to git (isn't it?).  
> 
> bzr can do similar things:
> 
> bzr merge some-branch
> bzr merge --force some-other-branch
> bzr commit
> 
> Since bzr doesn't auto-commit after a merge, the above commands
> actually creates only one revision with 3 parents (the --force is here
> to let merge do it's job with uncommited changes in the tree).

But does it store octopus merge as octopus: commit with more than two parents? In git making octopus merge is easy, perhaps too easy...

True, the above actually could be inferred from mentioned blog post
  http://vcscompare.blogspot.com/2008/05/meet-candidates.html
namely that there were problems with converting git repositories
containing octopus merges to Mercurial (and there was a bug in 
git-fast-export which made bzr-fast-import crash on them).

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland