[PATCH 2 of 3] mergetools.hgrc: disable vimdiff as a valid proposal for default mergetools

[Martin Geisler]

Pierre-Yves David <pierre-yves.david at logilab.fr> writes:

> On Thu, Aug 02, 2012 at 04:02:32PM +0200, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
>> On 02/08/12 15:35, Pierre-Yves David wrote:
>>
>> internal:merge is a last resort. It is not in any way recommended or
>> best practice. Some users might have gotten used to that mode of
>> operation from CVS and prefer that. They are welcome. We should
>> however not expose new and innocent users to that - just like we
>> should avoid 'merge' and 'vimdiff'.
>
> Well,
>
> 1) Vimdiff or other non obvious tools should not be the default,
> 2) People need a simple way to resolve merge conflict,
> 3) Solution that allows the user to use its usual text editor are the
> only viable default solution I see.

If there's no graphical display, then I think I agree with you. It's
nice that Mercurial probes the system and finds a GUI merge tool, but
it's not nice if it fires up vimdiff when I merge over a SSH connection.

>> And as mentioned above: There are different opinions on whether <<<
>> === >>> markers are pretty ok. Not having the ancestor revision makes
>> it harder than necessary to resolve correctly.
>
> I agree that the current internalmerge marker are suboptimal. But It
> does not seems hard to improve it. I use a version that create:
>
>     <<< local
>     This is the local version
>     ==== base
>     This is the common ancestor version
>     ==== other
>     This is the merge target version
>     >>>

Personally, I find anything more than "local and other" markers very
annoying when we talk about textual markers. If I get markers in my file
I want to be able to look at each conflict and delete the version I
don't like -- a binary choice. I find it too much if there are three
regions and I have to compare A with B and A with C and delete
everything but one region.

For graphical tools I'm of course okay with seeing the ancestor version
too -- I feel it makes sense to present more information in a graphical
tool where they three files can be aligned properly with each other.

> So I would propose a default merge tools that:
>
>     1) Warn about the merge-tools help topic
>     2) also create nice a useful marker
>     3) also create base, other and local files
>
> - A marker only version would be accessible using "internal:mergemarkers"
> - A file only version would be would be accessible using "internal:mergefiles"

We have internal:dump which I think is very close to what you want from
internal:mergefiles.

-- 
Martin Geisler

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