Hi,
It would be convenient if git had a facility for adding "merge hints",
both for automatic conflict resolution, as well as giving clues to
persons inheriting or merging a branch.
The main use case here is aiding long-running branches. Imagine a
feature branch where all uses of FOO_STR is replaced with STR. For
various reasons this branch cannot be merged to master, yet it needs to
be kept up to date, and new uses of FOO_STR keeps getting added.
If you are lucky, your compiler will complain that FOO_STR is undefined
when running whatever tests you have after a merge. But perhaps the new
code is for a different platform and not reached during a test run. A
diligent developer might also run 'git grep FOO_STR' *if* they know
about the change. Fixing these trivial problems is boring and manual.
A more tricky case is where...
def foo(a,b)
has become
def foo(a,b,c)
...and c is a required positional argument. Any new uses of 'foo' will
need to be adjusted during a merge. This function can be multi line and
not easily greppable.
The diligent developer is in no shortage of tools: "git log -G foo
..master" will reveal any potential problems, even before the merge.
Yet, they still have to 1) know about the change; and 2) fix up the uses
manually.
It seems to me that git could offer better tools to deal with this.
Perhaps a ".mergehints", where you could provide a regular expression
either for automatic merge resolution, or just have git complain loudly
when a given pattern is merged (say, introduce conflict markers even
though there were no "real" conflicts). I.e.:
[hint1]
files = *.c
pattern = FOO_STR
transform = s/FOO_STR/STR
[hint2]
files = *.py
pattern = 'foo('
conflict = true
Thoughts? Are there other tools at the diligent developers disposal
that can aid with these kinds of problems?
