[ANN][PLUGIN] external merge

[John A Meinel]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> Martin Pool wrote:
>>> Perhaps we could have this behaviour builtin as say 'bzr merge
>>> --interactive', or automatically turned on by a user preference?  It
>>> could also be called from say 'bzr remerge --interactive'.
> 
> It would certainly be possible to implement external merges as a new
> merge type, or maybe a reprocessing step.  OTOH, with the API changing
> radically, it may be better to implement them in cmd_merge and cmd_remerge.
> 
> Aaron

I think having a plugin provide:

bzr merge --merge-type=xxdiff

Is the best way to do it. We can provide a useful base implementation
for interactive merge types. Something like
InteractiveMerger. So plugin authors have an easier time adding support
for their specific front-end.

And then when we get aliases/defaults into bzr, someone can just say

[ALIASES]
merge=merge --merge-type=xxdiff

Or we could add an option for:

[DEFAULTS]
merge-type = weave

I realize we are switching to TreeTransform, with the only thing holding
it back being my inability to agree to a naming scheme for the
'get_trans_id' functions. I'll reply there to get it done.


We also could change merge-type to support multiple arguments. Something
like:

--merge-type=weave,xxdiff

or

--merge-type=weave+xxdiff

or

--merge-type=weave --conflicts=xxdiff

The nice thing about the --conflicts version, is that it could run a
conflict check after all other merges have been done, rather than doing
it as you go.

But the basic idea is that it could try and do the merge in a
non-interactive form, and if that function does not succeed, then it
tries the next one.

You could even chain them with:
--merge-type=merge3,weave,vimdiff

Which would try plain merge, but if there was a conflict, it would try
weave merge, and if it still couldn't resolve it, it would open vimdiff
and ask you to do it.

The biggest reason I prefer adding a new merge-type is because then both
'bzr remerge' and 'bzr merge' have the option for using the new
functionality.

John
=:->

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