[Gnu-arch-users] Re: "Newbie-ized help"

[Miles Bader]

Aaron Bentley <address@hidden> writes:
>> It's _not the same_ as star-merge when used in the same context.
>
> Right.  star-merge does the right thing in every context that update 
> does, plus some that update gets wrong.  The fact that rejects go the 
> other way seems relatively unimportant.

That's my big beef with your changes to fai -- you make these judgements
like "seems relatively unimportant, so I can change it as I wish"
without much apparent experience actually _using_ these features.

I have in the past undone a star-merge and used update because I got too
confused by the conflicts generated by the former -- you see, when
merging into my own branches, I understand _my_ changes better than I
understand the changes made by other people (which I am merging into my
branch).  So when I see a reject which is my own change, it's sometimes
easier for me to think about how to apply this to the merged code.

Also, because it uses a simpler method to choose how to do the merge,
update is sometimes a better choice than star-merge (which just fucks
things up with its "cleverness"); with some of my common merges, I
_always_ want update's nice simple algorithm (which you've _removed_
with fai), but I do the extra manual effort to use star-merge anyway,
because I want to use --three-way to get automatic duplicate resolution.

star-merge --three-way is yet another bucket of worms -- I use it a
lot, because I like the automatic resolution of duplicates, but when I
have to fix a conflict, the style of conflicts it generates are quite
often much more confusing than seeing diff-style .rej files.

Ideally, I'd like there to be _one_ command that does the job of both
star-merge and update, and takes _independent_ flags for

  (1) auto-duplicate-resolution (apparently we can't use patch -N though)

  (2) conflict style (.rej or inline)

  (3) for .rej-style conflicts, the direction of the merge

  (4) some way to turn off star-merge's "clever" choice of patch endpoints,
      and just use the simple algorithm update currently uses.

Probably such a command should be called "update", BTW...

-Miles
-- 
`Life is a boundless sea of bitterness'