merge: minimize conflicts when common base is not shown (
issue4447)
Previously, two changes that were nearly, but not quite, identical would result
in large merge conflict regions that looked very similar, and were thus very
confusing to users, and lead people used to other source control systems to
claim that "mercurial's merge algorithms suck". In the relatively common case
of a new file being introduced in two branches with very slight modifications,
the old behavior would show the entire file as a conflict, and it would be very
difficult for a user to determine what was going on.
In the past, mercurial attempted to solve this with a "very smart" algorithm
that would find all common lines, but this has significant problems as
described in
2ea6d906cf9b.
Instead, we use a "very dumb" algorithm introduced in the previous patch that
simply matches lines at the periphery of conflict regions. This minimizes most
conflict regions well, though there may still be some degenerate edge cases,
like small modification to the beginning and end of a large file.
Mercurial for Plan 9 from Bell Labs
===================================
This directory contains support for Mercurial on Plan 9 from Bell Labs
platforms. It is assumed that the version of Python running on these
systems supports the ANSI/POSIX Environment (APE). At the time of this
writing, the bichued/python port is the most commonly installed version
of Python on these platforms. If a native port of Python is ever made,
some minor modification will need to be made to support some of the more
esoteric requirements of the platform rather than those currently made
(cf. posix.py).
By default, installations will have the factotum extension enabled; this
extension permits factotum(4) to act as an authentication agent for
HTTP repositories. Additionally, an extdiff command named 9diff is
enabled which generates diff(1) compatible output suitable for use with
the plumber(4).
Commit messages are plumbed using E if no editor is defined; users must
update the plumbed file to continue, otherwise the hg process must be
interrupted.
Some work remains with regard to documentation. Section 5 manual page
references for hgignore and hgrc need to be re-numbered to section 6 (file
formats) and a new man page writer should be written to support the
Plan 9 man macro set. Until these issues can be resolved, manual pages
are elided from the installation.
Basic install:
% mk install # do a system-wide install
% hg debuginstall # sanity-check setup
% hg # see help
A proto(2) file is included in this directory as an example of how a
binary distribution could be packaged, ostensibly with contrib(1).
See https://mercurial-scm.org/ for detailed installation
instructions, platform-specific notes, and Mercurial user information.