Re: detecting rename->commit->modify->commit

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 1, 2008, 15:34 UTC
Message-ID: <20080501153457.GB11469@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <32541b130805010827r22169651s37c707071f3448f2@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 11:27:34AM -0400, Avery Pennarun wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Before you say this is not a realistic use case, I've personally had
> this exact problem:
> 
> - I had a project with all of my work in a folder "src"
> - I decided that the 'src' folder was redundant, so I moved it all to
> the root folder
> - Someone else was working on an old maintenance branch which still had 'src'
> - When I merged from that person, some new files were created under
> 'src', and of course didn't work.

Sure. But we've also had the exact case of:

  - there are some files in subdir/, but that is not a good name, and
    there is something else that you are going to add that would be
    better named as subdir/.
  - you rename subdir/ to bettername/
  - you create subdir/newfile

but you _don't_ want newfile to go into bettername/. It's _replacing_ what went into bettername/.

So I don't think you can always track the intent automatically.

Though if you could specify the intent to the SCM, you could differentiate at the time of move between these two cases, and the merge could do the right thing later. Or alternatively, you could specify at time of merge which to do. It's just that nobody has implemented it.

-Peff