>--- Forwarded mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>On Thursday, February 17, Paul Sander wrote:
>>
>> I postulate that there are file formats for which no merge tool is possible.
>> Hence, there will never be any working merge tool available for some files.
>Aiee, therein is the rub. (I make a horrible scott, but I try) You'd have
>to define "merge", for the above to make sense. I can merge any three files.
>Simply concatenate them, or XOR them all together. The output may not make
>much sense, but they are "merged" in some sense of the word.
>I'll agree with you though if you say that there may not be any sensible
>method to automatically merge certain file-formats and keep the syntactic
>and semantic format of the file "correct"...
That is exactly what I meant. I had assumed that the definition of "working
merge tool" included the notion that what it produced would have the
following properties:
1. The output is meaningful, i.e. it is understandable as valid source code
by the tool(s) that interpret its content and that of the contributors.
2. The output contains elements from the contributors. Such elements may be
intermixed, possibly under the direction of the user.
3. The output has the proper semantics as defined by the user.
In other words, /bin/true, cat < /dev/null, cat $*, pr -3m $*, and the like
are unlikely to be "working merge tools" for arbitrary data types.
>--- End of forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
