Re: [Monotone-devel] merge algorithm question

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hello Nahtaniel,

thank you for your detailed answer. I'll have to learn more about the
different merge algorithms...

What's happening with the 'merge in working directory' feature? With
that it would be easier to circumvent the problem.
(Manually merge two revisions and then commit as having two ancestors).

Regards

        Markus

On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 00:20 -0800, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> Well, the question is the "somehow" :-).  It's an area of ongoing
> research.
> 
> One thing to note is that with the roster merger, the "common
> ancestor" is _only_ used for file contents that have been edited in
> both parts of the tree.  File names, attrs, and the first pass of file
> content merging all use the *-merger, which does not depend on
> choosing a common ancestor and AFAIK should handle this fine.
> 
> In general, though, and without doing lots of careful analysis on your
> case, yeah, we may not be able to handle it perfectly; more
> sophisticated content mergers like weave mergers might do better.
> However, there are currently no weave mergers known that have either a
> complete theoretical analysis; in fact, they all still have known
> cases where they will silently and surprisingly mismerge.  So for now
> we just added the part that we knew how to get right, and it should do
> _much_ better than what we have now, even if it's not perfect for
> everything...
> 
> Hope that helps,
> -- Nathaniel
>