Re: Improving merge of tricky conflicts

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 24, 2020, 19:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20200724194840.GA4013174@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqk0ytn208.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 06:19:19PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Unfortunately, there is no ">>>>>>>" shown with this code, as $_
> seems to get clobbered before the sub returns, so ...

Ah yeah, thanks for pointing it out (as you might guess I was mainly looking at the diff output to see if it was broken ;) ).

Your suggested fix is probably what I'd do (I really wish perl localized $_ automatically when entering new blocks, but I suspect they would never do so because of compatibility).

Show 7 quoted lines

> >   my $pre = File::Temp->new;
> >   print $pre @$pre_data;
> 
> I am debating myself if I want to see the base version between these
> two extra diffs.  Perhaps there is no need, as either one of these
> two extra diffs should be sufficient to see what was in the base
> version.

Yeah, I didn't give too much thought to the output, but was afraid of making it too long and hard to read. In addition to whether to show the base, I also wondered whether we could omit the "---/+++" header for each diff. It's mostly boilerplate, and the signal of "hey, this is the diff between 'base' and 'ours'" could be done on the "|||||||" line (which also could potentially use a different character to be more distinct).

I was also tempted to remove the hunk header since the line numbers are fairly useless. But it is possible for the diff to have multiple hunks, and you'd still want to show that.

My big challenge now will be remembering to try to use this next time I run into a conflict that could be helped by it. :)

-Peff