In the brave new world of distributed version control, history is no longer linear. It can branch freely, under no central control. But what is perhaps more interesting is that you can merge disparate branches back together. This makes it much easier to do long-term feature work, because it is possible to track a moving target. For the ActionMonkey project, we are following a procedure where all changes are reviewed before they are pushed to the actionmonkey branch. This means that we won’t have a huge blob of changes that need review before they are integrated into mozilla-central.

This creates a new class of problem: how do you perform merges? Is it necessary to review merge changesets with the same rigor as regular changes? How would one actually go about reviewing a merge changeset?

Today, I wanted to update ActionMonkey with the latest changes from mozilla-central. There is enough divergence between ActionMonkey and Mozilla 1.9 that this is not always a simple task: fortunately for me, the only conflicts that required any real merging were fairly simple. I went ahead an performed the merge and did some basic testing. But I really want Jason Orendorff to review my changes for sanity. There is no simple way to see what I actually did:

• Interactive graph of changes
• hgweb view of changes

It isn’t hard to diff this changeset against its mozilla-central parent, or against its actionmonkey parent. But neither of these diffs give you a sense of the real work involved in the merge. What I really want to give to Jason is a static view of a three-way merge as it already happened, highlighting the source locations where I made conflict resolutions or manual changes. Does anyone know if such a tool exists for Mercurial, or for any other distributed version control system?

Because I don’t know of a tool like this, I did the next-best thing: in my checkin comment, I carefully listed every file and function where I made a conflict resolution or manual change. This will at least make it clear in the future where I may have goofed.