Re: feature/package+vc 04c4c578c7 3/4: Allow for packages to be installed directly from VCS

[Philip Kaludercic]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>
>> Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2022 06:27:04 +0000
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Can you elaborate on the "difficult" part?  You could always stash any
>> > local changes before pulling, then un-stashing them after.  This
>> > should work reliably, I think?
>> 
>> Difficult in the sense that to my knowledge there is no --dwim flag to
>> tell Git to try and avert a conflict at any cost.  Instead you would
>> have to know what the right operation is depending on the current state
>> of the repository and the kinds of conflicts that pulling creates.
>
> If the changes are in the same parts of a file, merge conflicts are
> inevitable, and are a necessary part of this kind of operation.  So
> why is that perceived as a problem?
>
> I think we should try to avoid conflicts and failures where a
> simple-minded merge will do.  But if a conflict is inevitable, we
> should punt and let the user fix that.

The issue I believe I had was that package-vc uses vc-ignore to add a
few files to the list of ignored files, and this could trigger an
"unnecessary" conflict when updating the package.  But I believe that
this only occurs if the .gitignore file was modified in upstream source.