I'm experimenting with <<<<<<< merge conflict markers in difftastic: recreate the conflicting files and then diff them.
What do you think? Merge conflicts are confusing even at the best of times, but maybe difftastic's UI can help a little.
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I've released difftastic 0.50!
In this release:
* Merge conflicts! Difftastic now understands <<<<<<< syntax and shows a syntactic diff of the underlying files.
* Updated parsers for Elixir, Erlang, Go, Kotlin and Racket
* Various styling quality-of-life improvements
It's amazing that merging work at all.
It's a dumb textual transform that provides no guarantees that the code is even syntactically valid, let alone correct. The problem feels AI-complete.
I've seen bad resolutions of merge conflicts way more than bad automatic merges though.
Merge any sequence of patches (e.g. rebasing a branch) feels like it relies on hope. Whether or not you get conflicts, whether or not the output is syntactically valid or does the right thing: sometimes the computer does too little, and other times it does too much.