Re: Making GIT XML aware?

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 1:57 PM, <david.hagood@gmail.com> wrote:
> However, it seems to me that if there were some way to plug into GIT's
> merging logic, it would be possible to design an XML aware merging tool
> that might help on this (generalizing: if you could have content-aware
> merging libraries you could make all sorts of merges go more smoothly).
> For the specific case of an XML file, if you could have some way to denote
> tags and/or attributes that are "don't cares" you could address problems
> like I am having. You could also theoretically exploit a knowledge of the
> format to better identify what chunks are changes and possibly track
> motion within the files better.

You have a couple of options here, both of which you can read about in
'man gitattributes'.

If you have "don't care" attributes, that's a good sign that you
shouldn't be storing them *at all*.  You could use the 'filter'
feature of gitattributes to remove them (or convert them to a
constant) on checkin, and regenerate them on checkout.

As for merging algorithms, you can supply a custom one using the
'merge' gitattribute.

> Absent that, is there a way to tell git "in case of an unresolvable merge
> conflict, don't modify the file but put the other version of the file
> somewhere (e.g. filename.other) so that I can use an external tool to
> resolve the differences"? In this case, EA doesn't know how to use the
> standard conflict tags within a file to extract deltas.

You can apparently override this with the 'merge' attribute as well.

Have fun,

Avery