[issue1478] default merge action broken in 1.1

[Jonathan Shapiro]

New submission from Jonathan Shapiro <shap at eros-os.com>:

Beginning in 1.0 or 1.1 (I think 1.1), linux-based installations of hg started
trying to use "filemerge" as the default merge tool. Since filemerge is only
present on OS-X, this cannot possibly be the right thing to do on a linux platform.

This is urgent -- I might even go as far as critical -- because for Fedora (and
perhaps other linux) users the current status is that "hg merge" is broken in a
mysterious and unfixable way. Mysterious because it used to work. Unfixable
because there is no documentation (including none in the release notes)
describing what changes should be made to the hgrc file to fix this misbehavior.

After a week of head scratching (and I *did* know enough to immediately
recognize that this was a problem to solve in the hgrc file), I was able to work
around the misbehavior by adding:

[merge-patterns]
** = filemerge

[merge-tools]
filemerge.executable = /usr/bin/merge
filemerge.args = -A $local $base $other

Prior to this change, my ~/.hgrc did not have either a [merge-tools] or a
[merge-patterns] section at all, so this wasn't a case of misconfiguration.
Also, I did not have extdiff enabled or configured.

hg merge is something that really needs to work reasonably "out of the box", and
there is no reason I can think of that the existing behavior should have become
broken in the *absence* of a bad [merge-tools] or [merge-patterns] section.

It is possible that this is a Fedora packaging issue. Perhaps a filemerge
utility was added and Fedora failed to pick it up in their packaging. But this
does not seem likely, because the path that hg is attempting to use to run
filemerge is very clearly an OS-X path.

If this is an issue in trunk, then in my opinion it is important enough to
warrant a point release unless it has already been fixed in 1.2. If it turns out
that this is a Fedora packaging issue, let me know and I'll be more than happy
to light a fire there.

----------
messages: 8457
nosy: djc, pmezard, shap, tonfa
priority: urgent
status: unread
title: default merge action broken in 1.1

____________________________________________________
Mercurial issue tracker <mercurial-bugs at selenic.com>
<http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue1478>
____________________________________________________