Re: [PATCH] mergetools: Add tortoisegitmerge helper

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> writes:

> Even though the old tortoisemerge and the new tortoisegitmerge
> have completely different syntax, could we still use the existence
> of one when deciding which syntax to use?
> ...
> ...and then later merge_cmd and diff_cmd
> can delegate to {diff,merge}_cmd_legacy() and
> {diff,merge}_cmd_gitmerge() functions to do the work.
>
> It's just a thought.  translate_merge_tool_path()
> is too low-level to do it, but it seems like we could
> get away with it by having some extra smarts in the
> scriptlet.

Sounds like a far better approach to me.  I'd like to at least see
an attempt be made to make that work first.

>>>> This paragraph needs to be rewritten to unconfuse readers.  The
>>>> original is barely intelligible, and it becomes unreadable as the
>>>> set of tools subtracted by "minus" and added by "plus" grows.
>>>
>>> But I think this should not be part of this patch.
>>
>> I agree that it can be done (and it is better to be done) as a
>> preparatory step.  The current text is barely readable, but with
>> this patch there will be two "minus", and the result becomes
>> unreadable at that point.
>>
>> It also could be done as a follow-up documentation readability fix.
>
> Another thought would be to minimize this section as much
> as possible and point users to "git difftool --tool-help".

We had a similar discussion here:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/201913/focus=201976

and Documentation/git-{diff,merge}tool.txt have stayed quiet since
then.

But Documentation/merge-config.txt tries to list everything that _could_
be enabled, and I do not necessarily think having one single
location that lists everything is such a bad idea.

Is there a way for me to programatically tell what merge.tool and
diff.tool could be enabled for a particular source checkout of Git
regardless of what platform am I on (that is, even though I won't
touch Windows, I want to see 'tortoise' appear in the output of such
a procedure)?  We could generate a small text file from the Makefile
in Documentation and include it when building the manual pages if
such a procedure is available.