Moving to D

[Russel Winder]

Walter,

On Fri, 2011-01-07 at 10:54 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
> Russel Winder wrote:
> >> One thing I would dearly like is to be able to merge branches using meld.
> >>
> >> http://meld.sourceforge.net/
> > 
> > Why?
> 
> Because meld makes it easy to review, selectively merge, and do a bit of editing 
> all in one go.

Hummm . . .  these days that is seen as being counter-productive to
having a full and complete record  of the evolution of a project.  These
days it is assumed that a reviewed changeset is committed as is and then
further amendments made as a separate follow-up changeset.  A core
factor here is of attribution and publicity of who did what.   By
committing reviewed changesets before amending them, the originator of
the changeset is noted as the author of the changeset in the history.
As I understand the consequences of the above system, you are always
shown as the committer of every change -- but I may just have got this
wrong, I haven't actually looked at the DMD repository.  

> > Mercurial, Bazaar and Git all support a variety of three-way merge tools
> > including meld, but the whole point of branching and merging is that you
> > don't do it manually -- except in Subversion where merging branching
> > remains a problem.
> 
> But I want to do it manually.

Clearly I don't understand your workflow.  When I used Subversion, its
merge capabilities were effectively none -- and as I understand it,
things have not got any better in reality despite all the publicity
about new merge support.  So handling changesets from branches and
elsewhere always had to be a manual activity.  Maintaining a truly
correct history was effectively impossible.  Now with Bazaar, Mercurial
and Git, merge is so crucial to the very essence of what these systems
do that I cannot conceive of manually merging except to resolve actual
conflicts.

Branch and merge is so trivially easy in all of Bazaar, Mercurial and
Git, that it changes workflows.  Reviewing changesets is still a
crucially important thing, but merging them should not be part of that
process.  

> > With Mercurial, Bazaar and Git, if you accept a changeset from a branch
> > you jsut merge it, e.g.
> > 
> > 	git merge some-feature-branch
> > 
> > job done.  If you want to amend the changeset before committing to HEAD
> > then create a feature branch, merge the incoming changeset to the
> > feature branch, work on it till satisfied, merge to HEAD.
> > 
> > The only time I used meld these days is to process merge conflicts, not
> > to handle merging per se. 
> 
> I've always been highly suspicious of the auto-detection of a 3 way merge conflict.

I have always been highly suspicious that compilers can optimize my code
better than I can ;-)

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20110108/f483f791/attachment.pgp>