Question

Is theere a way of finding out what changes a bzr update will do without actually doing it.
Specifially I would like to have a bit of warning if there is going to be a conflict.

Answer 1

Not directly that I’m aware of, that’s what bzr revert is for. However, there is a common way to structure your local branches to help. I use one local branch that mirrors the central branch, then I branch off of that for my work. When I’m ready to “check in,” I update my local mirror branch, which always succeeds without conflicts because I haven’t changed my working copy of that branch. Then I merge my feature branch into my local mirror branch, then push my local mirror branch to the central repository.

The advantage of this setup in your case is you could use bzr merge --preview or bzr diff to see the changes if you don’t want to actually try the merge. I personally prefer just to revert the merge until the conflicts are fixed either upstream or in my local feature branch.