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.
$ cat <<EOF > merge
> import sys, os
> print "merging for", os.path.basename(sys.argv[1])
> EOF
$ HGMERGE="python ../merge"; export HGMERGE
$ hg init A1
$ cd A1
$ echo This is file foo1 > foo
$ echo This is file bar1 > bar
$ hg add foo bar
$ hg commit -m "commit text"
$ cd ..
$ hg clone A1 B1
updating to branch default
2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd A1
$ rm bar
$ hg remove bar
$ hg commit -m "commit test"
$ cd ../B1
$ echo This is file foo22 > foo
$ hg commit -m "commit test"
$ cd ..
$ hg clone A1 A2
updating to branch default
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ hg clone B1 B2
updating to branch default
2 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
$ cd A1
$ hg pull ../B1
pulling from ../B1
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files (+1 heads)
(run 'hg heads' to see heads, 'hg merge' to merge)
$ hg merge
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)
$ hg commit -m "commit test"
bar should remain deleted.
$ hg manifest --debug
f9b0e817f6a48de3564c6b2957687c5e7297c5a0 644 foo
$ cd ../B2
$ hg pull ../A2
pulling from ../A2
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 0 changes to 0 files (+1 heads)
(run 'hg heads' to see heads, 'hg merge' to merge)
$ hg merge
0 files updated, 0 files merged, 1 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)
$ hg commit -m "commit test"
bar should remain deleted.
$ hg manifest --debug
f9b0e817f6a48de3564c6b2957687c5e7297c5a0 644 foo
$ cd ..