Re: Merge-friendly text-based data storage

From: Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 27, 2012, 13:01 UTC
Message-ID: <CAD77+gR=p+jhN5qNoRgjtQPHqgqrdtcSmqAy_4d0NUaqE6ZkVg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4F718496.4030808@ira.uka.de>

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:12, Holger Hellmuth <hellmuth@ira.uka.de> wrote:

> I may be misunderstanding something, but lets assume you want to merge a
> file that has "version: 0" with one that has "version: 1" and their last
> common ancestor would have "version: 0" naturally. So the merge would not
> fail even though the file layout changes.

Ugh, I did not consider that. I can't come up with a way, other than a custom merge driver, to prevent this. Am I correct?

> And there would be random merge failures with lines added at the same line
> number even if different.

Yes, I know. That was the main reason why I asked for merge-friendly designs. I briefly considered union merges, but that's not a good idea for obvious reasons.

> The normal merging in git isn't suited for this task, it has different
> objectives. Without a custom merge driver as Junio suggested

I more or less accepted that I will have to write one, eventually.

> the only way
> would be to store each data line in its own file. As you store file paths
> that would even fit, but I doubt it is what you had in mind

I considered this as well, but that's extremely expensive and wasteful.

-- 
Richard