annotate docs/evolve-good-practice.rst @ 5619:5673730db8d5 stable

evolve: clean merge state when content divergence resolution has no changes

This patch backs out b723805d7fe1, which only hid the problem.

Usually mergestate is cleared (or should be cleared) when creating a new
changeset, but sometimes there are situations when there's nothing to commit.

When solving content divergence resulted in no changes and no new changesets
were created, mergestate was left untouched. That's a problem because sometimes
mergestate contains files with conflicts that were already resolved by user,
and such mergestate only applies to the current wdir parent. Since evolve has
already dealt with the current wdir parent successfully when it reached this
code, this is a good place to clean the mergestate.

.. Copyright 2011 Pierre-Yves David <[e-mail]>
..                Logilab SA        <[e-mail]>

-----------------------------------------
Good practice for (early) users of evolve
-----------------------------------------

Avoid unstability
-----------------

The less unstability you have the less you need to resolve.

Evolve is not yet able to detect and solve every situation. And your mind is
not ready neither.

Branch as much as possible
--------------------------

This is not MQ; you are not constrained to linear history.

Making a branch per independent branch will help you avoid unstability
and conflict.

Rewrite your changes only
-------------------------

There is no descent conflict detection and handling right now.
Rewriting other people's changesets guarantees that you will get
conflicts. Communicate with your fellow developers before trying to
touch other people's work (which is a good practice in any case).

Using multiple branches will help you to achieve this goal.

Prefer pushing unstability to touching other people changesets
--------------------------------------------------------------


If you have children changesets from other people that you don't really care
about, prefer not altering them to risking a conflict by stabilizing them.


Do not get too confident
------------------------

This is an experimental extension and a complex concept. This is beautiful,
powerful and robust on paper, but the tool and your mind may not be prepared for
all situations yet.