Trying again, as my response 2 hours ago never showed up On 5/24/2013 8:24 AM, Brett Cannon wrote:
I was trying to do a simple merge of a doc change between 3.3 and default and the usual Misc/NEWS conflict came up. I have had things like this happen and after pain iwth kdiff3 just edited the default version But when I looked at the diff it was massive! Turns out that Misc/NEWS in default goes from 3.3.1rc1 to 3.4.0a1 (http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/24ffb0148729/Misc/NEWS) while Misc/NEWS in 3.3 goes properly through all versions between 3.3.1rc1 to 3.3.3rc1 (http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/3c4a5dc29417/Misc/NEWS). I do not know if I had the same cause. Never looked that far. I have to get to work so I don't have time to fix this, but if someone does have the time to unwind this mix-up that has accumulated that would be great. And maybe it's finally time to bite the bullet and come up with some way to automatically generate Misc/NEWS from commit messages.
+100 on ending or ameliorating NEWS conflict hell. I do fewer commits because of it.
Proposal: If the commit message has a line like ***Library then everything *above that line is put into NEWS. This makes automatic generation optional and optionally allows additional non-NEWS extras.
The immediate problem is conflict with the lower context, the three lines below Library
<blank>
which is often different between 3.3 and 3.4 and possibly changed anyway since the patch was made. Can hg be told to ignore the lower context and just match the 3 upper context lines for this file?
The larger problem is that our workplace design subverts the premise of non-checkout repositories, that people usually work on different areas of files, making conflicts rare. Our current design makes conflict normal.
-- Terry Jan Reedy