Re: [RFD] remembering hand resolve...

Junio C Hamano wrote:

As people on the list may know, I keep many mini topic-branches
and keep combining them on top of then-current master to publish
"pu".  This involves resolving merge conflicts by hand, when the
areas topic-branches touch overlap.

The thing is, I find myself resolving the same conflicts over
and over.  This is because the master branch tends to advance
faster than topic branches that touch an overlapping area.

How can that be possible? If the area of code in master is modified 
beyond simple merging from the topic-branches, the resulting diff (which 
has to be against master's HEAD) should apply cleanly so long as there 
aren't *new* changes to master, in which case the pu commit needs 
adaptation again, so it wouldn't really be the same conflict (or even 
necessarily a similar one), would it?

If I linearize topic-branches that conflict with each other in
some way, say base topic B on top of topic A, I would not have
problem merging them into "pu" as long as I do not change my
mind later and try to merge only topic B without topic A.  But
that defeats the whole point of having independent topic
branches.

Wouldn't cherry-pick be useful here? If it isn't, I fail to understand 
how a merge can solve it for you. Admittedly, I know little of the inner 
workings of git.

A trivial solution would be to save the diff between conflicted
automerge result before hand resolving, and the result of my
hand resolve, and apply with "patch" when I see a conflicted
automerge the next time.  I've tried this by hand and it worked
quite well tonight, but I felt it was somewhat kludgy.  We
should be able to do better than that, with some tool support.

Another obvious way is to avoid rebuilding "pu"; instead I could
pull "master" into "pu" every time I have added something new to
"master".  That would work most of the time, until I decide to
change the order the topic branches are merged into "pu" (or
drop one of them).

Couldn't you do something like this:

for t in $topic_branches; do
	checkout $t
	git rebase master
done
git checkout master
git branch -D pu
git checkout -b pu
git pull . $topic_branches

That's what I thought you were doing right now, but I can't imagine that 
flow leading to the same conflicts over and over, so I must be mistaken 
somehow.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231