merge-base flexibility

[Byron]

Make it easier to use features of merging commits with merging trees for greater flexibility.

Follow-up of #1651

Tasks

• a function to merge merge-bases specifically.
• Expose what's needed in gix.

Next PR

• A way to know if a textual merge would have resulted in a conflict without auto-resolution.
• A way to resolve conflicts towards using our or their side. Either at conflict time, or post-conflict time, but fully tested as part of baseline expectations. Probably better to make it as part of the merge operation.
  • Note that we still want to record if a conflict occurred, and in case of text-merges we want to know if there would have been a conflict if we wouldn't have auto-resolved it. Lastly, for binary merges, we may assume a conflict, of course.
• A way write the conflict declaration into an index or adjust an optional index as well (which might be easier) so we get all the stages right.

Possible Tasks

• Repository::merge_commits()
• A trivial gix merge commit
• Submodule merges are also possible! Maybe outscope it though! libgit2 also doesn't try it.
• textconv with context, see this gist for details.
  • There seem to be different 'tiers' of tools, some don't get GIT_DIR set, others do.
  • It also seems that diff-programs get too much context right now, but that depends on how much is passed to them by the caller as gix-command::Context.
• How to model virtual-merge-bases? Can be none or many, user should have control over how this is done.
• Actual tree-based merging
• Make blob-merge based conflict handling possible in the tree merge from gix at least. - not needed for now
• consider finding a way to more clearly say what happened, maybe with some additional explanation so it's more of a drill-down way of working, instead of a super-enum with a lot of very similar cases.

Archive

Everything is about MergeORT.

ability to re-use object caches of a repo that has seen the base-tree already, but overall, who knows*

• merge-options passed with -X ours for instance don't affect tree-related auto-resolutions, just the ones related to content. This could be implemented when there is demand though.
• it uses an empty tree if there is no merge-base - we must allow the same.
• it allows for multiple merge-bases, creating a virtual one by merging all merge-bases together using the same algorithm, recursively.
• merges can have conflicts without a individual files being involved, for instance when directory renames clash
• Note that merge-ORT cannot properly handle renames within renamed directories, ending up with the source of the subdir-rename still present.

❯ git ls-tree -r $(git merge-tree main feat)
100644 blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391    a
100644 blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391    git-sec-renamed/2
100644 blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391    git-sec-renamed/7
100644 blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391    git-sec-renamed/subdir/6
100644 blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391    git-sec/subdir-renamed/6
100644 blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391    git-sequencer
100644 blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391    gix/5
100644 blob e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391    h

• Must make sure that possible types of conflicts are properly communicated, to not degenerate information
• It puts conflict-markers in the blobs of the result tree, with annotations to provide additional context
• Need resolution configuration, see git2::MergeOptions.
• data stored by path, and is interned in the map to allow pointer-based comparisons
  • merge-info with everything one needs to know, also related to renames
  • or conflict information
  • it uses a memory-pool/arena to get memory for many paths all at once (and also release it like that)
• paths start out as conflicted, and then can later be changed to non-conflicting if a content-based merged succeeded.
  • If it remains conflicts, the meta-data is used to produce an 'as merged as possible' version with conflict markers that can be checked out to the working tree.
• hunks can partially overlap, but can also be resolved line-by line to some extend.