[HN Gopher] On the Nature of Merge Conflicts
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       On the Nature of Merge Conflicts
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2021-08-12 18:06 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (neverworkintheory.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (neverworkintheory.org)
        
       | pabs3 wrote:
       | One way to help solve merge conflicts is incremental merge/rebase
       | - bisect the merge to find which commit causes the conflict, then
       | let the programmer solve that, then repeat again. I'm using git-
       | imerge for this, but there is also mergify and a faster fork of
       | it called git-mergify-rebase.
       | 
       | https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge
       | https://github.com/brooksdavis/mergify https://github.com/CTSRD-
       | CHERI/git-mergify-rebase
        
         | code_biologist wrote:
         | Thank you for the links! I wrote my own crappier helper to
         | "stitch" a conflicted branch back up to date with upstream.
         | These are great.
         | 
         | Stitching together individual conflicted commits makes it
         | obvious whether a conflict is purely textual or there's a true
         | semantic conflict. I think a lot of programmers have a panic
         | reaction to merge conflicts, don't think about what the
         | conflict actually is, then introduce bugs through mistaken
         | merges.
        
       | hazbot wrote:
       | I like the focus on tools to assist the human, rather than
       | automating merge conflicts. Even if you come up with a new clever
       | algo that reduces merge conflicts by x% from where we are now,
       | how do you decide that these two pieces of now non-conflicting
       | don't interact with eachother to produce undersirable behaviour?
       | Unless you solve that pretty well, I much prefer the pattern of
       | keeping a human brain in the loop.
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-13 23:00 UTC)