[Monotone-devel] Re: Non-modal merge

[Stefan Monnier]

> Yes, I know. But without --show-overlap the output also
> includes all the non-overlapping changes and this confuses one
> dramatically, too.

Just the first few times because you're not used to it.  It's annoying to
have to deal with those "no conflict" conflicts, but the upside of having
full ancestor info for the real conflicts more than makes up for it.

> I've not found an option combination for diff3(1)
> which shows the ancestors but not the non-overlapping parts. I've tried
> many combinations of --merge, -A, -E, -x and -X but have not found a
> solution.

Indeed AFAIK there's no such solution.  It's easy to change diff3 to provide
this feature, and I proposed such a change to diff3's maintainer about 10
years ago, but I didn't have a clean patch back then and never got around to
write one.

> As CVS also doesn't show the ancestor information, I decided
> that I go this way, too.

I think it was an error to choose this in CVS and it'd be an error here
as well.  Admittedly, the error is much worse in CVS where the merge takes
place on the CVS server and hence can't be fixed by the user.

> Yes, such an additional environment variable would be possible.
> But I've now made MTN_MERGE_DIFFUTILS more flexible: it can hold a
> comma-separated list of options. Currently "partial" and "showall" are
> implemented. "showall" is to pass --show-all to diff3(1) now.

I'd prefer if show-all were the default, of course, but I can live with
that, thanks.


        Stefan