filemerge: add support for partial conflict resolution by external tool
A common class of merge conflicts is in imports/#includes/etc. It's
relatively easy to write a tool that can resolve these conflicts,
perhaps by naively just unioning the statements and leaving any
cleanup to other tools to do later [1]. Such specialized tools cannot
generally resolve all conflicts in a file, of course. Let's therefore
call them "partial merge tools". Note that the internal simplemerge
algorithm is such a partial merge tool - one that only resolves
trivial "conflicts" where one side is unchanged or both sides change
in the same way.
One can also imagine having smarter language-aware partial tools that
merge the AST. It may be useful for such tools to interactively let
the user resolve any conflicts it can't resolve itself. However,
having the option of implementing it as a partial merge tool means
that the developer doesn't *need* to create a UI for it. Instead, the
user can resolve any remaining conflicts with their regular merge tool
(e.g. `:merge3` or `meld).
We don't currently have a way to let the user define such partial
merge tools. That's what this patch addresses. It lets the user
configure partial merge tools to run. Each tool can be configured to
run only on files matching certain patterns (e.g. "*.py"). The tool
takes three inputs (local, base, other) and resolves conflicts by
updating these in place. For example, let's say the inputs are these:
base:
```
import sys
def main():
print('Hello')
```
local:
```
import os
import sys
def main():
print('Hi')
```
other:
```
import re
import sys
def main():
print('Howdy')
```
A partial merge tool could now resolve the conflicting imports by
replacing the import statements in *all* files by the following
snippet, while leaving the remainder of the files unchanged.
```
import os
import re
import sys
```
As a result, simplemerge and any regular merge tool that runs after
the partial merge tool(s) will consider the imports to be
non-conflicting and will only present the conflict in `main()` to the
user.
Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D12356
[This file is here for historical purposes, all recent contributors
should appear in the changelog directly]
Andrea Arcangeli <andrea at suse.de>
Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de>
Goffredo Baroncelli <kreijack at libero.it>
Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix at mulix.org>
Mikael Berthe <mikael at lilotux.net>
Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com>
Brendan Cully <brendan at kublai.com>
Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml at free.fr>
Jake Edge <jake at edge2.net>
Michael Fetterman <michael.fetterman at intel.com>
Edouard Gomez <ed.gomez at free.fr>
Eric Hopper <hopper at omnifarious.org>
Alecs King <alecsk at gmail.com>
Volker Kleinfeld <Volker.Kleinfeld at gmx.de>
Vadim Lebedev <vadim at mbdsys.com>
Christopher Li <hg at chrisli.org>
Chris Mason <mason at suse.com>
Colin McMillen <mcmillen at cs.cmu.edu>
Wojciech Milkowski <wmilkowski at interia.pl>
Chad Netzer <chad.netzer at gmail.com>
Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
Vicent Seguí Pascual <vseguip at gmail.com>
Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
Nguyen Anh Quynh <aquynh at gmail.com>
Ollivier Robert <roberto at keltia.freenix.fr>
Alexander Schremmer <alex at alexanderweb.de>
Arun Sharma <arun at sharma-home.net>
Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jeffpc at optonline.net>
Kevin Smith <yarcs at qualitycode.com>
TK Soh <teekaysoh at yahoo.com>
Radoslaw Szkodzinski <astralstorm at gorzow.mm.pl>
Samuel Tardieu <sam at rfc1149.net>
K Thananchayan <thananck at yahoo.com>
Andrew Thompson <andrewkt at aktzero.com>
Michael S. Tsirkin <mst at mellanox.co.il>
Rafael Villar Burke <pachi at mmn-arquitectos.com>
Tristan Wibberley <tristan at wibberley.org>
Mark Williamson <mark.williamson at cl.cam.ac.uk>