Using Mercurial for other kinds of ASCII files than codes?

[Tom Anderson]

On 20/10/12 13:43, Pierre JUILLARD wrote:
> Another limitation would be the application of the "diff" tool:
> When modifying a part (new revision):
> - the STEP file will not be modified manually,
> - it will be open in a CAD program, the part will be modified, and the 
> STEP file will be re-written
> This means that the order of the sections in the STEP file may change.

That could be a problem. Mercurial will be able to cope with this, no 
problem, but you may end up with painful merges. Consider this scenario:

1. file A contains:
section 1
section 2
section 3

2. Alice clones the central repository, opens A, and edits section 1; 
the CAD tool produces:
section 1a
section 2
section 3

3. Alice clones the central repository, opens A, and edits section 1; 
the CAD tool produces:
section 2
section 3
section 1b

4. Alice pushes to the central repository

5. Bob pulls from the central repository and merges; he gets a 
conflicted file which looks like:
section 1a - conflict between Alice's change and Bob's pseudo-deletion
section 2
section 3
section 1b - clean addition

That's a pain. There is a real conflict, between 1a and 1b, but 
Mercurial can't see it, because 1a and 1b are in different places in the 
file.

What would be good is if there was a tool that would normalise a file so 
that the sections are in some consistent order. Then, you simply 
normalise each file before committing it, probably using a hook. That 
would ensure that conflicts are detected properly. Does such a tool 
exist? Could you write one?

This would be a bit like auto-formatting source code before committing 
it, to avoid spurious merge conflicts caused by whitespace changes etc. 
That's also something i highly recommend doing - as long as you can 
ensure everyone on the team has the same formatting rules!

tom

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Tom Anderson | Developer | +44 20 7826 4312 | timgroup.com 
<http://timgroup.com/>

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