[Monotone-devel] tracking upstream

[Brian May]

Hello,

I asked a similar question on my local mailing list concerning git.
Just wondered what perspective I would get here, in particular with
monotone people. I think similar issues apply in both cases.

Lets say I am tracking an upstream project. As I am working for a
company, not myself individually, I have
to share my changes with other people working in the same company. At
the same time I want to push the changes upstream.

A - B - C

I have revision C, I then make my change J, while upstream makes D, E, F:

A - B - C - D - E - F
             \ - J

This is simple if upstream likes my changes, they will merge them, and we have:

A - B - C - D - E - F - G
             \ - J        -/

And everyone will be on revision G, the result of the merge.

However, what happens if upstream reject my changes? They don't like
them. Lets assume they have good reason for rejecting the changes and
I agree with them. What do I do? I could revert my changes and in
commit K:

A - B - C - D - E - F
             \ - J - K

However, even though F and K are now a NOP, I am still on a different
branch to upstream. If I try to get changes from upstream, they will
get merged into my tree. If I try to push changes to upstream, they
will get J and K again too - although this is a NOP - it complicates
the history of the upstream repository, and some people are fussy
about such things. Plus the person doing the merge has to be convinced
that it really is a NOP.

So another thought is to kill off my branch, and go back to working from F.

Unfortunately, this needs to be done to all my users too, and any
changes they made would have to get reapplied under F.

Just curious what to do for this situation.

I have a suspicion that there are no easy answers, and possibly the
best approach is the last one.

Thanks
-- 
Brian May <address@hidden>