Re: Letting tools partially resolve conflicts in a file

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

Martin von Zweigbergk <martinvonz@gmail.com> writes:

> The solution I had in mind for letting merge tools communicate partial
> resolution was to let them take 3 inputs (as today) and produce 3
> outputs (perhaps by overwriting its 3 inputs). That way they can leave
> conflicts in a conflict-marker-agnostic way. ...
>
> Correct. My team at work hopes to create a language-aware mergetool.
> The "#includes and imports" I mentioned is just one case that such a
> tool could resolve. Hopefully it can also figure out cases like where
> both sides modify an array (on a single line), or where an expression
> is modified on one side and re-wrapped on the other. The thing is that
> it will obviously not be able to handle *all* conflicts, so we want to
> leave remaining conflicts for the user, so that's where this idea
> comes in. I don't foresee having more than one such tool in the chain
> before the user gets involved.

Hmph, OK, so the part I guessed that more than one such tools are
chained together was incorrect.  I do not find it too implausible to
wish to first let the "include/import" tool to clean up the fallout
of renaming the include/module files this source depends on, and
then let the "renamed variable" tool to handle the fallout of
renaming a local variable in a file in this source file, in this
order or the other way around.  It may be a tall order to write a
tool that can handle *all* coflicts, but it would be a nice future
to see that multiple tools, each of which specializing one corner of
its own, work well together.