Re: [Quilt-dev] address@hidden: Bug#298788: Desirable new feature: quilt merge]

[Catalin Marinas]

Catalin Marinas <address@hidden> wrote:
> Martin Quinson <address@hidden> wrote:
>> also from the debian BTS. I dunno what to think about it. I never forked any
>> patch, so I've no idea about merging them afterward ;)
>
> Assuming that you only try to merge forked patches, a diff3 merge
> could be performed between the common ancestor of all the files, the
> old patch and the newly forked one. The common ancestor is easy since
> you get it in .pc/patch/file, the local file is one of the descendants
> and 2nd descendant is generated by applying the forked patch to the
> ancestor.

I just realised this won't work since diff3 will report conflicts for
all the changes in both patches, even if they are the same. Maybe
xxdiff is a bit smarter here but I'm not sure.

The common ancestor should be the state of the tree when the fork
happened but if both the old patch and the newly forked one are
modified afterwards, this information is no longer preserved.

Catalin