Re: [PATCH] merge_blobs: use strbuf instead of manually-sized mmfile_t

Thank you for working on this! Let me just address two things from an outsider's perspective:

On 2016-02-16 at 06:50, Jeff King wrote:

Since I cannot comment on the code quality or maturity of merge-tree, but would appreciate if this tool worked as expected, let me quote Chris' comment[1] on why he uses merge-tree instead of just "git merge", hoping that it has an impact upon your decision whether to keep the code or "ripping it out":

"One might ask, why not use the porcelain 'git merge' command? One reason is, in the context of the two phase commit protocol, we'd rather do pretty much everything we possibly can in the voting stage, leaving ourselves with nothing to do in the finish phase except updating the head to the commit we just created, and possibly updating the working directory--operations that are guaranteed to work. Since 'git merge' will update the head, we'd prefer to do it during the final phase of the commit, but we can't guarantee it will work. There is not a convenient way to do a merge dry run during the voting phase. Although I can conceive of ways to do the merge during the voting phase and roll back to the previous head if we need to, that feels a little riskier. Doing the merge ourselves, here, also frees us from having to work with a working directory, required by the porcelain 'git merge' command. This means we can use bare repositories and/or have transactions that use a head other than the repositories 'current' head."

What do you mean exactly by "this case is buggy"? Doesn't make sense to me.

Stefan

[1] https://github.com/Pylons/acidfs/blob/master/acidfs/__init__.py