Re: first-class conflicts?

> On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 3:49 AM Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Elijah
>>
>> [I've cc'd Martin to see if he has anything to add about how "jj"
>> manages the issues around storing conflicts.]
>>
>> On 07/11/2023 08:16, Elijah Newren wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 6, 2023 at 1:26 PM Sandra Snan
>>> <sandra.snan@idiomdrottning.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Is this feature from jj also a good idea for git?
>>>> https://martinvonz.github.io/jj/v0.11.0/conflicts/
>>>
>>> Martin talked about this and other features at Git Merge 2022, a
>>> little over a year ago.  I talked to him in more depth about these
>>> while there.  I personally think he has some really interesting
>>> features here, though at the time, I thought that the additional
>>> object type might be too much to ask for in a Git change, and it was
>>> an intrinsic part of the implementation back then.
>>>
>>> Martin also gave us an update at the 2023 Git Contributors summit, and
>>> in particular noted a significant implementation change to not have
>>> per-file storage of conflicts, but rather storing at the commit level
>>> the multiple conflicting trees involved.  That model might be
>>> something we could implement in Git.  And if we did, it'd solve
>>> various issues such as people wanting to be able to stash conflicts,
>>> or wanting to be able to partially resolve conflicts and fix it up
>>> later, or be able to collaboratively resolve conflicts without having
>>> everyone have access to the same checkout.
>>
>> One thing to think about if we ever want to implement this is what other
>> data we need to store along with the conflict trees to preserve the
>> context in which the conflict was created. For example the files that
>> are read by "git commit" when it commits a conflict resolution. For a
>> single cherry-pick/revert it would probably be fairly straight forward
>> to store CHERRY_PICK_HEAD/REVERT_HEAD and add it as a parent so it gets
>> transferred along with the conflicts. For a sequence of cherry-picks or
>> a rebase it is more complicated to preserve the context of the conflict.
>> Even "git merge" can create several files in addition to MERGE_HEAD
>> which are read when the conflict resolution is committed.
> 
> Good point. We actually don't store any extra data in jj. The old
> per-path conflict model was prepared for having some label associated
> with each term of the conflict but we never actually used it.
> 
> If we add such metadata, it would probably have to be something that
> makes sense even after pushing the conflict to another repo, so it
> probably shouldn't be commit ids, unless we made sure to also push
> those commits. Also note that if you `jj restore --from <commit with
> conflict>`, you can get a conflict into a commit that didn't have
> conflicts previously. Or if you already had conflicts in the
> destination commit, your root trees (the multiple root trees
> constituting the conflict) will now have conflicts that potentially
> were created by two completely unrelated operations, so you would kind
> of need different labels for different paths.
> 
> https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/issues/1176 has some more discussion
> about this.
> 
>>> But we'd also have to be careful and think through usecases, including
>>> in the surrounding community.  People would probably want to ensure
>>> that e.g. "Protected" or "Integration" branches don't get accept
>>> fetches or pushes of conflicted commits,
>>
>> I think this is a really important point, while it can be useful to
>> share conflicts so they can be collaboratively resolved we don't want to
>> propagate them into "stable" or production branches. I wonder how 'jj'
>> handles this.
> 
> Agreed. `jj git push` refuses to push commits with conflicts, because
> it's very unlikely that the remote will be able to make any sense of
> it. Our commit backend at Google does support conflicts, so users can
> check out each other's conflicted commits there (except that we
> haven't even started dogfooding yet).
> 
>>> git status would probably
>>> need some special warnings or notices, git checkout would probably
>>> benefit from additional warnings/notices checks for those cases, git
>>> log should probably display conflicted commits differently, we'd need
>>> to add special handling for higher order conflicts (e.g. a merge with
>>> conflicts is itself involved in a merge) probably similar to what jj
>>> has done, and audit a lot of other code paths to see what would be
>>> needed.
>>
>> As you point out there is a lot more to this than just being able to
>> store the conflict data in a commit - in many ways I think that is the
>> easiest part of the solution to sharing conflicts.
> 
> Yes, I think it would be a very large project. Unlike jj, Git of
> course has to worry about backwards compatibility. For example, you
> would have to decide if your goal - even in the long term - is to make
> `git rebase` etc. not get interrupted due to conflicts.