On Thursday 2008 November 27 23:38, Stefan Monnier wrote: > >> when a config file has been changed locally, it's unable to merge the > >> local change with the upstream change: > > > > There is no general way to do this. The system would have to fully > > understand the config file and know all the ways the changes could > > conflict and interfere. > > Try to take the need to merge as a given, and instead of worrying "is it > possible?" think about "how are we going to do that?". Q: How are we going to do that? A: It's not possible in general. When something is impossible, it's impractical to think about how it would be done. All your answer would depend on being in some other reality, in which the task were possible, and therefore be impractical in this reality. Q.E.D. :P > You'll see it's > not nearly as hard as it sounds. E.g.: It is when you realize all configuration files are not text. Ex-Gentoo user; didn't like the configuration file update command dumping gconf files through less. I imagine diff3 would be quite a bit worse. NB: It would be nice for individual packages to "fully understand" *their* "config file(s) and know all the ways the changes could conflict and interfere" and then provide an auto-merge facility. The problem is impossible in general, but just hard at least a few specific cases. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss03@volumehost.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/
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