How to ignore remote revision when fetching/adding tracked bookmarks

[Gentoli]

i.e. resolve any conflict/overwrites jj bookmark track <branch> or jj git fetch can cause by taking the local revision

Some sample use case:

• Working on co-located git repo and trying to push a bookmark after modification via jj
• Fetching a branch which had a merge commit from the remote (e.g update PR). In this case it's better to ignore the remote changes and rebase locally. (currently it will move the bookmark to the merge commit)

Fixing these manually with jj abandon or jj bookmark set is fairly tedious when the simple resolution is most likely to drop the remote changes.

On a similar note: Is it possible to make jj untack a remote without deleting a local bookmark when the remote branch is deleted? It would be nice to keep the local bookmark for historical purposes.

[yuja]

Sounds like you need an untracked bookmark. If a local bookmark doesn't track a remote bookmark, the local bookmark won't be updated/deleted on fetch. There's a feature request to push local bookmarks without setting up tracking, but it's not implemented yet.

[Gentoli]

Yeah definitely something around tracking. I can imagine "push local bookmarks without setting up tracking" would simplify cases such importing remotes (looks like these are the related FRs: #4388 / #3235).

Maybe what I am looking for is push-only tracking. Where the local bookmark act as a source of truth and is unaffected by remote changes (and possibly untracked when the remote is deleted). Then the tracked bookmarks can still benefit from pushing by revsets.

[yuja]

Maybe what I am looking for is push-only tracking.

This was mentioned in other context #7072, but "push-only" mode contradicts our safety mechanism (akin to --force-with-lease in Git.) In order to push a local change without overwriting the remote change by mistake, there should be a common base.

[Gentoli]

That's fair but for what I was trying to achieve, it would be intentionally ignoring the remote. I guess it comes down to how to make the "ignore remote" UX work safely without having different step on each case (e.g. jj abandon <a> but a changes for each branch/fetch). Maybe it could be a command after the fetch/track to reset the bookmark to the last local commit while keeping tracking (e.g. jj op accept --local <bookmark>).

[bookmark tracking] being used for both the fetch and push end leads to weirdness
#7072

This is interesting, if how tracking works would be changed long term, it would definitely change the UX here. But I do like the simplicity for the current way of updating bookmarks on fetch. Just not quite applicable to all cases.

[yuja]

That's fair but for what I was trying to achieve, it would be intentionally ignoring the remote. I guess it comes down to how to make the "ignore remote" UX work safely without having different step on each case

Yes. Maybe you can do something like jj bookmark set -r 'at_operation(@-, NAME)' NAME, but we'll need a better command alias support to make it convenient.

#3673

[Gentoli]

Looks like at_operation works for remote changes that do not cause revision conflict. For resolving the conflict by taking the local change, there might need to be something extra.