I feel the original -------/+++++++ pair is slightly confusing because
each half can be a separator by itself. I don't know what character other
than '-'/'+' is preferred, but let's pick '%' (for "mod") per @martinvonz
suggestion.
One advantage of our conflict marker style (compared to the usual
3-way markers) is that they provide the user with the diff between the
base and one side so the user doesn't have to do that in their head
(which is how I use 3-way markers anyway). However, since we currently
always use the "first" side for the diff, that diff can be larger than
if we had picked the other side, which makes the marker style worse
than the usual 3-way markers. This has bothered me many times and it's
about time we fix it.
We don't even have any settings that affect the repo, so there's no
point in passing the settings. I think this was a leftover from before
we separated out the "workspace" concept; now we no longer create a
working-copy commit when we initialize a repo (we do that when we
attach the workspace).
We do it for all the other kinds of objects already. It's useful to
have the path for backends that store objects by path (we don't have
any such backends yet). I think the reason I didn't do it from the
beginning was because we had separate `RepoPath` types for files and
directories back then.
Most tests need a repo but don't need a working copy. Let's have a
function for setting up a test repo. But first, let's free up the name
`init_repo()` by renaming it to `init_workspace()` (which is also more
accurate).
I realized only recently that we can try to parse conflict markers in
files and leave them as conflicted if they haven't changed. If they
have changed and some conflict markers have been removed, we can even
update the conflict with that partial resolution.
This change teaches the working copy to write conflicts to the working
copy. It used to expect that the caller had already updated the tree
by materializing conflicts. With this change, we also start parsing
the conflict markers and leave the conflicts unresolved in the working
copy if the conflict markers remain.
There are some cases that we don't handle yet. For example, we don't
even try to set the executable bit correctly when we write
conflicts. OTOH, we didn't do that even before this change.
We still never actually write conflicts to the working copy (outside
of tests) because we currently materialize conflicts in
`MutRepo::check_out()`. I'll change that next.
I initially made the working copy materialize conflicts in its
`check_out()` method. Then I changed it later (exactly a year ago, on
Halloween of 2020, actually) so that the working copy expected
conflicts to already have been materalized, which happens in
`MutableRepo::check_out`().
I think my reasoning then was that the file system cannot represent a
conflict. While it's true that the file system itself doesn't have
information to know whether a file represents a conflict, we can
record that ourselves. We already record whether a file is executable
or not and then preserve that if we're on a file system that isn't
able to record it. It's not that different to do the same for
conflicts if we're on a file system that doesn't understand conflicts
(i.e. all file systems).
The plan is to have the working copy remember whether a file
represents a conflict. When we check if it has changed, we parse the
file, including conflict markers, and recreate the conflict from
it. We should be able to do that losslessly (and we should adjust
formats to make it possible if we find cases where it's not).
Having the working copy preserve conflict states has several
advantages:
* Because conflicts are not materialized in the working copy, you can
rebase the conflicted commit and the working copy without causing
more conflicts (that's currently a UX bug I run into every now and
then).
* If you don't change anything in the working copy, it will be
unchanged compared to its parent, which means we'll automatically
abandon it if you update away from it.
* The user can choose to resolve only some of the conflicts in a file
and squash those in, and it'll work they way you'd hope.
* It should make it easier to implement support for external merge
tools (#18) without having them treat the working copy differently.
This patch prepares for that work by adding support for parsing
materialized conflicts.
