Re: [RFC/PATCH] mergetool: clarify local/remote terminology

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 09:47:35PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> While I like the fact that somebody is trying to tackle the
> consistency issue, I do not like the approach itself.  Fudging
> the issue at the merge-tool UI level may make things appear more
> consistent when viewing the merge from within merge-tool, but it
> makes the views merge-tool gives and vi/less gives inconsistent.
> 
> It would be a lot more sensible to make sure that we always show
> the side that the end-user modified first and then the side the
> other party changed.

I hadn't considered that, because I never pay attention to the order of
changes between the conflict markers; I look at the nice "HEAD" and
"abcdef... commit subject" messages.

But then I don't do a lot of conflict resolution. Usually I either work
with tiny teams on a central-ish repository, or work on projects where I
am just a contributor.

So I agree that a consistent view makes sense, and I can see that
ordering of hunks is a sensible context clue. However, should this not
extend further, to the index numbering? Or do we not care, because
mortals rarely touch the index? What about "git-rebase --strategy=ours",
which really means "theirs"?

Unfortunately just swapping the arguments to git-merge-* in
git-rebase.sh doesn't quite work ("merge-ours" doesn't actually load the
index and say "pick the 'ours' stage"; it just says "whatever is in the
working tree is fine.").

-Peff