Re: [PATCH] git-mergetool: add support for ediff

[Picking up an old thread]

Theodore Tso [off-list ref] writes:

On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 11:19:49AM +1200, Sam Vilain wrote:

Hmm, well, here's a way of fixing it.  (See attached, below.)  It
adds a new command 'x', which when you hit it in the ediff control
window, exits with a error status of '1', indicating that the merge
has failed.  This is something which emerge, kdiff3, tkdiff, et. al
all support; but which ediff doesn't.

quoted

I still don't really understand why having to save the merged buffer and
exit is such a huge issue.  Already I have to select "-t emerge" to get
emerge.  I would have thought it would be better to just make the other
mode available, and let the user figure it out.

I'm just exploring alternatives.  Basically, it just seems
interesting that ediff has a lot of nice features, but also has some
incredibly user-hostile features.  The first time I tried using
ediff, I indeed tried saving the buffer and exiting it.  That's when
I discovered that after I changed the focus to the merge window and
saved it, when I tried typing ^X^C, the exit failed with the error
message "Attempt to delete a surrogate minibuffer frame".  That's
the sort of thing that will cause non-elisp programmers to run
screaming off into the distance.

Ted, I think you are somewhat missing the main audience here.  The
main audience are people who actually _use_ Emacs, and those will be
comfortable with the concept "save to have changes persist, don't save
if you don't want changes to persist, exit using C-x # or C-x C-c as
appropriate".  Basically, it would appear that you try figuring out
how to make ediff appeal to non-Emacs users.  But those would not have
emacs/emacsclient in their EDITOR variable in the first place.

I have been bitten by mergetool calling emacs rather than emacsclient,
resulting in a non-working merge (since the default directory was set
differently from what the call expected due to my use of the desktop
package), and mergetool afterwards assuming that the not-even-started
merge was successful.  A royal nuisance, and completely unworkable.

While it may be nice to have some Lisp preparation for people who
don't want to touch or learn Emacs _except_ for using it for merging
in git, I think we should first cater to people actually using Emacs
already.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum