begin quoting David Brown as of Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 07:42:40AM -0800: > 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
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/MergeProgram It should be emphasized that Mercurial by itself doesn't attempt to do a Merge at the file level, neither does it make any attempt to Resolve the conflicts. > 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. Choosing a common ancestor isn't merging. It's a nice trick, but given a crappy merge tool, you *still* get a crappy merge. And I'm not saying it's the wrong way, either. I will even concede that it's a brilliant design, making the merge tool pluggable. But that, doesn't by definition, provide a better merge. It _allows_ for a better merge, IF you chose a better tool to do the merges. Choose a worse one, or none, there's no joy in mudville. So while my assertion that mercurial doesn't to merges is a bit disingenuous, so is the assertion that it does. :) And hey, I was reading the webpage. It suprised the hell out of me that if I _don't_ have a three-way merge program installed, configured, and accessible, I'm toast. I haven't taken any time to experiment with the merging in hg or git. -- 'Can do no worse' is a very, very, very strong assertion. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
