Re: Live Merging from remote repositories

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Apr 14, 2005, 23:22 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfyxtose8.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <IGEMLBGAECDFPIKMIMLCCEELCHAA.barry@disus.com>

>>>>> "BS" == Barry Silverman <barry@disus.com> writes:

I have not thought about remote issues at all, other than the distribution mechanism vaguely outlined in my previous mail (not cc'ed to git list but I would not mind if you reproduced it here if somebody asked), so I am not qualified to comment on that part of your message.

BS> The way Junio has done it, no intermediate trees or commits BS> are used...

BS> Is this a bug or a feature?

I would call that a feature in that there is no need to look at intermediate state. I also might call that a misfeature in that it may have resulted in a better merge if it looked at intermediate state.

I just have this fuzzy feeling that, when doing this merge:

                     A-1 --- A-2 --- A-3
                    /                   \ 
    Common Ancestor                      Merge Result
                    \                   /
                     B-1 --- B-2 --- B-3

looking at diff(Common Ancestor, A-1), diff(Common Ancestor, B-1), diff(A-1, A-2), ... might give you richer context than just merging 3-way using Common Ancestor, A-3, and B-3 to derive the Merge Result. It might not. I honestly do not know.

BTW, Pasky, the above paragraph is my answer to your question in the other message <20050414202016.GC22699@pasky.ji.cz>:

Show 10 quoted lines

> But one different thing to note here.
> 
> You say "merge these two trees" above (I take it that you mean
> "merge these two trees, taking account of this tree as their
> common ancestor", so actually you are dealing with three trees),
> and I am tending to agree with the notion of merging trees not
> commits.  However you might get richer context and more sensible
> resulting merge if you say "merge these two commits".  Since
> commit chaining is part of the fundamental git object model you
> may as well use it.

Pasky> Could you be more particular on the richer context etc?