Nick Bowler to Anton Shepelev: >>Contextual diff-files a very good means of collab- >>orative development whenever they are used with >>source code, but I have a problem with .am files. >>If two patches should add new source files to the >>same directory, they will also have to modify ac- >>cordingly the Makefile.am that lists the sources >>for that location, and that is *very* likely to >>cause a conflict. > >True, but the resolution is normally trivial.
Trivial but manual, which some maintainers dislike so much as to accept only those patches as do not conflict with one another. >>What should you recommend to prevent Makefile.am >>from becoming the bottleneck of collaborative de- >>velopment and patch isolation? > >Since patch/diff work line-by-line, a common way to >reduce merge conflicts in this kind of a list is to >have one filename per line. A convention to keep >the list sorted can help as then new files aren't >always added to the end. That was my idea as well, but if the changes are not separated by the context range they will still con- flict. Thanks for the advice, I will try to per- suade the maintainersto do at least that. >You can also setup a custom merge handler in git. I do not maintain the project, so I can't. -- Please, do not forward replies to the list to my e-mail.
