Proposal: discourage packagers from enabling merge-tool configs

Steve Borho steve at borho.org
Wed Mar 11 12:33:50 CDT 2015


On 03/11, Augie Fackler wrote:
> From IRC just now:
> > 11:07 < newdan> durin42, well yesterday I had some help figuring out
> >    how to make rebase work more like git when conflicts happen (by
> >    default on my box it opens up gvimdiff which I don't know, and
> >    :qall-ing out made me actually lose some of my work)
> 
> This has burned me too. I believe our current position is that we
> think packagers should enable all the merge tools. I think that's
> dangerous for the above reason. Can we change that to recommend
> including it as a documentation sample, but to not enable them by
> default?
> 
> (It strikes me as particularly likely that gvimdiff is installed on
> machines without users explicitly requesting it, and that it'll be
> hard for non-advanced-vim types to get out of it without leaving the
> merge in a completely resolved state, which is annoying at best and
> catastrophic for a newbie at worst.)

I'm +1 for removing gvimdiff from the list of merge tools that gets
packaged in our installers (this comes from someone who has been using
vim for 20 years). It would be better to fail file merge entirely
(forcing manual resolve) than to dump new users into gvimdiff.

Perhaps the tool can be left in the file but commented out so those
handful of users who actually prefer vimdiff (I wonder who they are) can
un-comment it.

The rest of the merge tools are harmless, AFAICT.

-- 
Steve Borho


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