Re: [Monotone-devel] Merges and internal representation

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 05:46:29PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> Nathaniel et al,
> 
> With all the discussion on Codeville and weave representation recently, I
> just wanted to remind people that there are file formats (e.g. XML, other
> structured data formats) which are not particularly well suited to line
> based storage and merging; many SCMs like Clearcase have a pluggable
> architecture which allows files to be associated with a type manager
> responsible for knowing how to store, merge and annotate different types
> of files.
> 
> It would be nice to ensure that any changes as a result of codeville
> discussion didn't prejudice the capability to support a type manager
> architecture in the future.

Well, we'll still store and version arbitrary, uninterpreted binary
blobs.  The merge implementation is entirely client-side, and could be
made as smart or stupid as one likes.

It's not entirely clear what these tools would do; we could always in
principle add back 3-way merge ancestor selection stuff for this use
case, and hand off to an external 3-way merge tool, but, well, as
we've discovered, 3-way merge just doesn't work that well.  (Two merge
is always easy to support, as well, and for some of these formats that
might be all that's possible anyway...)

Perhaps people will start writing external format-specific
codeville-merge tools :-).

In any case, while the proposed changes do move us a bit away from
being able to support such tools (if we pull out the 3-way merge
ancestry selection code), they in no way rule it out, and since we
don't support it right now anyway, it's not really a regression :-).

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to
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