Looking for a few good merge UIs

Sam Shuster and David Caster have been working on a brand new merge  
engine for the VisualWorks merge tool. My understanding, is that it's  
quite a bit more stable and predictable than the old one. The current  
UI tool has been improved/simplified as well. As we go on, I'll be  
likely doing some additional work on the UI aspect of it. I'll be  
doing some short term smallish things, but I'm also interested in  
brainstorming out of the box a little. Part of that is an effort to  
stand on the shoulders of others. I have access to some interactive  
merge tools, but by no means all.

That's where you all (and this mail) come in. If you've used an  
interactive merge tool (text, Smalltalk, C, whatever), that you were  
particularly enamored with, whether because of it's layout, or  
simplicity, or power, or visualization, or color scheme, or whatever,  
I'd love to know about it. Maybe briefly why you liked it so much. If  
you have screenshots, or even better screencasts (www.jingproject.com  
is great for making free screencasts), or know that there is a free/
trial version, so that I can see or play, that makes it lots better.

Thanks! I look forward to any of your replies.

You can just reply to me, unless you feel the need to share with  
everyone, in which case I'll try to keep an eye out here as well.

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
"The best way to know you have a mind is to change it" -Judge Pierre  
Leval




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Travis,

I don't have anything off-hand, but will look around.  I do have a couple of requests for the actual implementation.

1.  Please make the engine highly configurable and disjoint from the UI.
2.  Please make the UI itself pluggable, extensible, augmentable, etc.
3.  To support automated merges, please allow rules for handling unresolved conflicts.

We have extensions to the Store model to implement roles, privileges, tags, and a more complex versioning/blessing scheme.  Quite often we want to merge versions that have a particular blessing level and were performed by a given person or group and belong to a certain development line by tag.  Making the UI and engine pluggable should allow us to easily extend the capability with our specific enhancements.

Having the merge engine fixed to the default Store setup (except perhaps for policies) will make it difficult for us to move toward our developer goal of continuous integration.  We have discussed nightly incremental merge builds for certain blessing levels from branch lines into trunk lines (by tag), but have not felt that the tools could adequately support that.  A merge engine that is fully configurable should allow this.

Thanks for your efforts and consideration!

Cheers!
 
Tom Hawker
--------------------------
Senior Framework Developer
--------------------------
Home +1 (408) 274-4128
Office +1 (408) 576-6591
Mobile +1 (408) 835-3643
 
-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Travis Griggs
Sent: Thursday, February 04, 2010 3:27 PM
To: VW-Dev DEV; VWNC List
Subject: [vwnc] Looking for a few good merge UIs

Sam Shuster and David Caster have been working on a brand new merge  
engine for the VisualWorks merge tool. My understanding, is that it's  
quite a bit more stable and predictable than the old one. The current  
UI tool has been improved/simplified as well. As we go on, I'll be  
likely doing some additional work on the UI aspect of it. I'll be  
doing some short term smallish things, but I'm also interested in  
brainstorming out of the box a little. Part of that is an effort to  
stand on the shoulders of others. I have access to some interactive  
merge tools, but by no means all.

That's where you all (and this mail) come in. If you've used an  
interactive merge tool (text, Smalltalk, C, whatever), that you were  
particularly enamored with, whether because of it's layout, or  
simplicity, or power, or visualization, or color scheme, or whatever,  
I'd love to know about it. Maybe briefly why you liked it so much. If  
you have screenshots, or even better screencasts (www.jingproject.com  
is great for making free screencasts), or know that there is a free/
trial version, so that I can see or play, that makes it lots better.

Thanks! I look forward to any of your replies.

You can just reply to me, unless you feel the need to share with  
everyone, in which case I'll try to keep an eye out here as well.

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
"The best way to know you have a mind is to change it" -Judge Pierre  
Leval




_______________________________________________
vwnc mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc

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Travis Griggs wrote:
> If you've used an  
> interactive merge tool

[...]

I'm afraid I don't have UI feedback to give, but I do have a wish for
the engine...

I would like it to merge bundles more smartly. If you have a bundle that
contains several packages, and you merge a publish of the bundle, and
the branch you're merging in has made changes to a package that is
unmodified in your image since the common ancestor version, the current
behavior is to dirty the package in your image, making a dirty version
that is identical to the already-published version.

In this case it would save a lot of work if it just loaded the
already-extant version.

Regards,

-Martin
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