Comment by pshc
11 years ago
The key to merging trees is that your editor generates the diff on the fly as you write—your editor's undo/redo stack and your version control system become one and the same. Every time you add, move, copy, switch out, or delete a node, the editor notes the operation on your delta log. When you push your code externally, you're really just shipping the log.
With these semantic deltas, merging should be highly unambiguous and automatable, even in degenerate cases.
Hm, the history will be dirty with abandoned experiments etc, but so what - great idea. I'd like to use that system for a while, but I'm still not sure if it will work.
I remember using jbpm graph language - it had nice graphical editor, but we still switched to xml view to very often, because it was much faster to work with text.
Maybe it's just a matter of proper tools, but I can't imagine how you allow graphic language to do this for example:
sed s/foo\("bar", ([a-Z0-9]+), "baz"\)/foo\(\1\); bar\(\1\); baz\(\1\);/g
Maybe it's problem with my imagination.
When I look at that line, my brain sees its structure, the different layers... :) It is totally representable without restoring to plaintext. With good fundamentals (ADTs) and good UX (an editor that looks like a text editor but is so much more) we can make it work.