Issue 2: "explain merge", "explain update" - A distributed version control system

Reported by Unknown User, Oct 2, 2003

(This entry was imported from the savannah tracker, original 
location: https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?5685)

variants on explain which give you a detailed description of what 
monotone *would* do if you issued that command (update, merge).

Comment 1 by Unknown User, Jun 7, 2004

I'd like to put in my vote for these -- more generally, a query but 
don't act mode for any command.

Comment 2 by Thomas Keller, Aug 11, 2010

We have a pretty good command help system by now, so "mtn help 
command" should really be enough.

Comment 3 by Stephen Leake, Aug 14, 2010

I think this bug is about adding a preview option to merge:

merge --preview

would generate the final revision description (change list), but not 
actually do the merge. The point is to understand what the final 
revision would look like, what files would change or be added.

This is similar to --dry-run in Gnu make.

'mtn show_conflicts' does part of this; it shows all files that 
change relative to both parents. Files that don't have conflicts 
don't change.

To show "files that are in one parent but not the other", 
we could add an option '--include-add_drop' to 'show_conflict' to 
include those as 'add' or 'drop' conflicts; the conflict resolution 
would be 'keep' or 'drop'.