Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] merge -Xindex-only

From: Michael Haggerty <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 17:21:22 +0200

[Resend because of address confusion in replied-to email.]

On 07/07/2013 08:00 PM, Thomas Rast wrote:
> I recently looked into making merge-recursive more useful as a modular
> piece in various tasks, e.g. Michael's git-imerge and the experiments
> I made in showing evil merges.
> 
> This miniseries is the extremely low-hanging fruit.  If it makes a
> good first step for git-imerge, perhaps it can go in like this.  It's
> not a big speedup (about 2.2s vs 2.4s in a sample conflicting merge in
> git.git), but it does feel much cleaner to avoid touching the worktree
> unless actually necessary.
> 
> Otherwise it's probably not worth it just yet; for what I want to do
> with it, we need some more reshuffling of things.

Interesting.

For git-imerge, it would be nice to speed up merges by skipping the
working tree updates.  10% might not be so noticeable, but every little
bit helps :-)

But the killer benefit would be if git-imerge could do some of its
automatic merge-testing and autofilling in the background while the user
is resolving conflicts in the main index and working tree.

Is it possible to use this option with an alternate index file (e.g.,
via the GIT_INDEX_FILE environment variable)?  Can it be made to leave
other shared state (e.g., MERGE_HEAD) alone?  If so, maybe it's already
there.

For this feature to be useful for test merges, it would be enough to
just get a retcode saying whether a given merge would succeed or conflict.

For it to be used for autofilling, it would also be necessary to be able
to create a commit from the merge result in the alternate index (this
would only be done when there are no conflicts).  I assume this part can
be done in the usual way using "git commit-tree".

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
[email-masked]
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/