Re: Makefile.am and patch orthogonality

[Nick Bowler]

On 2017-06-21, Anton Shepelev <address@hidden> wrote:
> Contextual diff-files a very good means of collaborative 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 accordingly 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.

> What should you recommend to prevent Makefile.am from becoming the
> bottleneck of collaborative development 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.

You can also setup a custom merge handler in git.

Cheers,
  Nick