Re: Google Summer of Code 2009: GIT

[saurabh gupta <saurabhgupta1403@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> You can cut it both ways.  For an OO document, you do not necessarily need
> any file-level merger at the driver level, but just let the "binary"
> driver declare conflicts and punt.  A merge helper can do all the work
> starting from the "original, ours and theirs" that are not smudged with
> conflict markers.
>
> Between these two extremes, the discussion from other people in the thread
> seemed to all focus too heavily on the "driver punts" approach, forgetting
> that mergetool is useful only because most of the time we do not have to
> even use it, thanks to the fact that "xdl" driver works reasonably well
> for most trivial cases where branches being merged stayed away from each
> other, which is the majority case.  It is a huge win from the productivity
> point of view, and many people might be unaware of it because it is so
> invisible.

If I am not wrong, then for merging two xml files, if we use a simple
xdl merge driver then it will mark the conflicts in the normal way as
it does for simple text files. As far as I can understand, the
following things are supposed to be aimed here taking an example of
xml file:


=>Merging of two xml files

=> existing merge driver (like xdl) is called which marks the
conflicts points just like a normal text file.

=> the conflicted file can be read through a text terminal and
conflicted lines can be seen.

=> suppose the xml file is from the domain of OO document. Then, a
merge helper for OO xml type file is called which takes input as the
conflicted file produced by xdl driver.

=> The merge helper creates a new file or changes the input file to
make it a valid xml file so that it can be opened in OpenOffice and
user can see the markers like "====" or "<<<<<"  in an appropriate
manner and can resolve the file manually.


> When it cannot autoresolve,
> but there is no way to "mark" a tentative result with conflict markers, it
> can do the same thing as the "binary" driver and let the mergetool backend
> handle the "driver punted" case.

I think you mean to say that in case, there is a conflict and the
changes don't overlap, then merge driver leaves the file as it is and
the merge helper will handle the file.


-- 
Saurabh Gupta
Senior,
NSIT,New Delhi, India