On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 02:29:10AM -0800, SJS wrote:
Apparently, mercurial doesn't do merges.
(I was poking around on the mercurial webpages today and discovered this.)
I'm curious where you got this, since it is blatantly false. Mercurial
does tree-combining merges in a similar manner to git, which means it tends
to choose a much better common ancestor than CVS, or Subversion would.
Well, subversion can choose a good common ancestor, since it relies on the
user to tell it what that common ancestor is.
Now, yes, it calls to an external program 'merge' to do the actual merge
work, but all of them will either do that, or just incorporate the code out
of merge into themselves. Most can be configured, because you need very
different tools to merge some kinds of things (imagine bitmap images).
The "hard" part of merging isn't the 3-way merge, but figuring out what the
multiple versions are. It's not that 3-way merging isn't hard, but there
have been good solutions for a long time. Figuring out what files to give
it is what requires the metadata.
Dave
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