Re: Makefile.am and patch orthogonality

[Anton Shepelev]

Nick Bowler to Anton Shepelev:

>>Contextual diff-files a very good means of collab-
>>orative development whenever they  are  used  with
>>source  code, but I have a problem with .am files.
>>If two patches should add new source files to  the
>>same  directory, they will also have to modify ac-
>>cordingly the Makefile.am that lists  the  sources
>>for  that  location,  and that is *very* likely to
>>cause a conflict.
>
>True, but the resolution is normally trivial.

Trivial but manual, which some  maintainers  dislike
so  much  as  to accept only those patches as do not
conflict with one another.

>>What should you recommend to  prevent  Makefile.am
>>from  becoming the bottleneck of collaborative de-
>>velopment and patch isolation?
>
>Since patch/diff work line-by-line, a common way to
>reduce merge conflicts in this kind of a list is to
>have one filename per line.  A convention  to  keep
>the  list  sorted can help as then new files aren't
>always added to the end.

That was my idea as well, but if the changes are not
separated  by the context range they will still con-
flict.  Thanks for the advice, I will  try  to  per-
suade the maintainersto do at least that.

>You can also setup a custom merge handler in git.

I do not maintain the project, so I can't.

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