Re: Config spec for git

From: Martin von Zweigbergk <martinvonz@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 22, 2021, 18:19 UTC
Message-ID: <CANiSa6ieZrsjQD0+5dCMQCyCZzEVeLpQij8AOFS1R4RYGqbf7g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <37ef900a-d9bf-1941-75eb-ea8556e2ba8c@iee.email>

On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 8:38 AM Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

>
> It feels like your config specs are like feature branches, but that what
> is missing (from Git, relative to the config spec) is a merge strategy
> that can define which particular files/folders are merged at the one
> time, rather than the current 'all files' being merged. This desire has
> come up a few times when large (corporate?)  projects need to merge
> large independent feature branches that will need different specialists
> to handle different groups of files (i.e. partial merges, e.g. [1]), but
> that hasn't been implemented (yet) as it would need someone to think it
> through and work on it.
> --
> Philip
> [1]
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/BY5PR19MB3400EB9AD87DFE612AFD5CC390810@BY5PR19MB3400.namprd19.prod.outlook.com/
>
> Collaborative conflict resolution feature request
>

FWIW, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and implementing it in https://github.com/martinvonz/jj. Being able to represent a conflicted file state has a lot of benefits, of which collaborative conflict resolution is among the smaller ones (allowing automatic rebase every time a commit is rewritten is much more useful, IMO). I need to document the design but you can find an old version of it (from before I rewrote the README to target users) is at [1]. The design can of course be copied to Git.

[1] https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/blob/2879d817dd1021f8dc2ea5e42000c1d5d50e4fc7/README.md#commits-can-contain-conflicts