c17rThe Future of Version Control
Is it a good thing to have merges that never fail? Often a merge failure indicates a semantic conflict, not just "two changes in the same place". You want to be aware of and forced to manually deal with such cases.
I assume the proposed system addresses it somehow but I don't see it in my quick read of this.
Should you be counting on confusion of an underpowered text-merge to catch such problems?
It'll fire on merge issues that aren't code problems under a smarter merge, while also missing all the things that merge OK but introduce deeper issues.
Post-merge syntax checks are better for that purpose.
And imminently: agent-based sanity-checks of preserved intent – operating on a logically-whole result file, without merge-tool cruft. Perhaps at higher intensity when line-overlaps – or even more-meaningful hints of cross-purposes – are present.
> It'll fire on merge issues that aren't code problems under a smarter merge, while also missing all the things that merge OK but introduce deeper issues.
That has not been my experience at all. The changes you introduced is your responsibility. If you synchronizes your working tree to the source of truth, you need to evaluate your patch again whether it introduces conflict or not. In this case a conflict is a nice signal to know where someone has interacted with files you've touched and possibly change their semantics. The pros are substantial, and it's quite easy to resolve conflicts that's only due to syntastic changes (whitespace, formatting, equivalent statement,...)
If you're relying on a serialized 'source of truth', against which everyone must independently ensure their changes sanely apply in isolation, the. you've already resigned yourself to a single-threaded process that's slower than what improved merges aim to enable.
Sure, that works – like having one (rare, expensive) savant engineer apply & review everything in a linear canonical order. But that's not as competitive & scalable as flows more tolerant of many independent coders/agents.
And yet after all these year of git supporting no source of truth we still fall back on it. As long as you have an authoritative version and authoritative release then you have one source of truth. Linus imagined everyone contributing with no central authority and yet we look to GitHub and Gitlab to centralize our code. Git is already decentralized and generally we find it impractical.