Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: [cdv-devel] more merging stuff (bit long...)

* Nathaniel Smith:

> (One horrible idea I had, suitable for scaring small children who are
> interested in merge algorithms: since it seem like trees may actually
> be _easier_ to merge than text, by passing to the representation
> of nodes-and-pointers-to-parents and then applying a nice scalar merge
> algorithm, why not apply the same trick to the linear ordering
> structure that makes up text?  Model each line as a (text, pointer to
> preceding line) pair, and merge on those.

I've been thinking about the very same thing (I call this "atom
inference", and my atoms are your scalars).  Actually, I'm convinced
that this is the language textual merges should be described in.

This problem is quite similar to figuring out the adds/deletes/renames
in a particular change from a before-the-change tree and an
after-the-change tree.  I doubt it can be fully automated, and users
probably don't want to document each hunk in the required detail
("this -/+ change replaces the same line with a new version" vs "this
-/+ change deletes a line and adds a new, unrelated one").

However, I hope that your voting algorithm does not require this level
of detail.