conflict resolution in Meld

[Adam Dingle <adam medovina org>]

I'm trying to understand the state of conflict resolution (for git) in Meld today.  I know this is a new feature and there have been a bunch of messages about this on this mailing list in the last few months, but those are somewhat detailed and I'm trying to get the big picture.

I'm using meld from git master.  When I run git mergetool on the command line, I see a meld comparison with LOCAL, BASE and REMOTE.  I can merge changes from LOCAL and REMOTE into BASE and save them, and they end up in the working directory in a place that git understands.  In short, this works pretty well.

When I open Meld in source control view and double click a conflicting file, I see something completely different.  I see three panes presenting REMOTE, MERGED (i.e. git's merge output with conflict markers) and LOCAL.  All three of these panes point to files in /tmp which are read-only.  I can merge my changes into the central pane, but can't save them without manually choosing a filename to save to.  This seems much less useful.

Questions:

1. It seems strange to me that opening a conflicting file from Meld's source control view produces a different result than running git mergetool.  Shouldn't these be exactly the same?  Will they be?

2. Is the second view I described above (with the read-only files in /tmp) only partially implemented or broken?  Could it not be just the same as the git mergetool view, which works pretty well already?  Or am I missing something here?

adam