Subject: Re: how do I resolve this merge manually + mergetool bug

From: Charles Bailey <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:13:30 +0000

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 03:32:50AM -0500, Caleb Cushing wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Charles Bailey <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > I'll look at adding
> > a test case to mergetool and see how easy it is to get it to handle
> > this case better.
> 
> few weeks back I created a patch for mergetool, it was rejected
> ultimately on the basis that it had to cleanup temporary files and in
> reality this was a problem with a lot of mergetool, the suggestion was
> made that mergetool needs refactoring. I believe this problem is a
> similar symptom. basically mergetool should touch my files before I
> tell it what to do. if it has to move and back up my files before
> deciding then at the very least it should copy them back into place if
> I delete the remote. preferably in this case though it would just
> delete the remote or backup my local files and copy the remote in
> after I told it what to do (or maybe even delete my local files).

Coincidentally, last night I started looking at a mergetool
refactoring but more with unifying the handling of temporaries and
actions between the different types of merge (symlink, deleted file
and 'normal').

I'm more of the opinion that in any non-trivial case (i.e. not a
regular file/file merge), it *shouldn't* do anything until you tell it
what you want it to do. Clearly, between a tree and a blob, mergetool
is not going to be able to invoke a mergetool on set of three blobs,
but it should work out what it can do before prompting for a choice
from the user of what they want it to do.

-- 
Charles Bailey
http://ccgi.hashpling.plus.com/blog/