Re: Automatic 3 way merge for conflicts

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 20 December 2012 16:12, Piotr Piastucki <leech miranda gmail com> wrote:
>> I definitely don't want to be replacing text in MERGED with text in
>> BASE. The only correct possibility here is to use ancestor information
>> that already exists in MERGED, if it's there.
>>
>> In other words, if our MERGED file has diff3 conflict markers (rather
>> than the more common two-way conflict markers), we can reasonably
>> strip out the LOCAL and REMOTE parts of the conflict, which would
>> reliably leave the portion derived from BASE. There's no need to
>> actually consult BASE ourselves, or to make decisions about which
>> chunk to use. We just need to be able to get a diff3 formatted
>> conflict from the VC.
>>
>
> Fair enough. BTW, it would be awesome to see a way to run this new mode from
> command line so that it can be used with git mergetool etc.
> Something like:
> meld LOCAL BASE REMOTE --output=MERGED --output_is_already_merged_switch
> or
> meld LOCAL MERGED REMOTE --base=BASE
> And then:
> 1) show regular 3-way diff if MERGED contains no conflict markers
> 2) alter MERGED content and show 3-way diff if MERGED contains diff3
> markers (maybe, but not necessarily, offer switching to auto-merge)
> 3) show regular 3-way diff if MERGED contains non-diff3 conflict
> markers and offer switching to auto-merge

That sounds pretty good to me, and similar to what I was about to
write up. I hope that we can do it without additional command line
options however.

Anyway, I'll try to get time to write up an actual behaviour proposal
detailing how I think this should work.

cheers,
Kai