On May 14, 2004, at 4:01 AM, Ian Brockbank wrote:
> Why do you say XML cannot be merged? All the XML I have worked with
> has
> been as mergeable as source code - i.e. mostly trivial changes in
> unrelated areas of the file; sometimes conflicts in the same area of
> the
> file which hopefully will get caught and flagged by the merge tool (but
> occasionally will result in duplicate sections of code). If the merge
> tool didn't make any attempt, I would end up using a diff tool to do
> the
> merge by hand - but I would most definitely be doing a merge.
>
> Of course, there always the chance of tools getting confused - I always
> check and test after the merge before checking in. But that goes for
> all text document types - .c, .h, .pl, ...
>
> I'm with Curtis on this one - I would like my XML to be treated as
> text.
I'm going to guess that you are talking about hand-edited XML "source
files" (just like .c .h and .pl are normally hand-edited). But there
is an increasing number of cases where XML just happens to be the
internal format of a document that is meant to be opaque outside tools
specifically designed to manipulate them. My favorite relevant example
of this is OmniGraffle documents
(http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/). Other programs
that I would guess may display similar behavior include Visio,
OpenOffice documents, and maybe even MS Office documents.
That said, I do use auto-props to declare my OmniGraffle documents as
*.graffle = svn:mime-type=application/octet-stream
Another text format that displays similar behavior would be RTF, which
is why application/rtf is often used rather than text/rtf.
So maybe all those XML files with "*/*+xml" mime-types tend to be
mergeable?
I just want to make sure these other cases are considered. A blanket
statement about the mergeability of XML does not seem correct to make.
Maybe a blanket statement about "*/*+xml" mime-type files can be made
though.
I certainly do agree that many mergeable XML files do exist, such as
XHTML web pages.
-Travis
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Received on Fri May 14 16:20:26 2004