git-imerge VS gumtree

Afaik, there's currently no official way to pause/stash a rebase/merge-in-progress. (There is git-imerge which supports incremental merges/rebases (basically split a big merge into smaller ones), but I never used it and think you'll need to use it from the start of a merge/rebase.)

Try git imerge.

If the merge is large in the number of commits involved git imerge may be useful to you. It breaks down one big merge into many smaller merges, essentially merging one new commit from each branch, one at a time. The advantage being that you only ever need to consider the conflict between two individual commits at a time.

The repo for it is https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge and the blog post / instructions is at https://wilsonmar.github.io/git-imerge/

Similar ideas have been discussed before in Git, but I don't think anyone has acted on them much. Michael Haggerty's git-imerge tries to make conflicts shareable, but I think it was more of a side-effect of the original goal of optimizing rebase/merge and auto-reducing conflicts to their minimal representation. I'm very curious how conflicts are represented in Jujutsu so I can better understand this power. I'm curious about how conflicts in conflict-resolution commits are handled and other such magic.

That gist seems like a simplified version of https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge, so check that out if you haven't. (I haven't looked at git-imerge in a long time, so I should read about it again myself.)

I'm not familiar with Pijul, and haven't finished watching this presentation, but IME the problems with modern version control tools is that they still rely on comparing lines of plain text, something we've been doing for decades. Merge conflicts are an issue because our tools are agnostic about the actual content they're tracking.

Instead, the tools should be smarter and work on the level of functions, classes, packages, sentences, paragraphs, or whatever primitive makes sense for the project and file that is being changed. In the case of code bases, they need to be aware of the language and the AST of the program. For binary files, they need to be aware of the file format and its binary structure. This would allow them to show actually meaningful diffs, and minimize the chances of conflicts, and of producing a corrupt file after an automatic merge.

There has been some research in this area, and there are a few semantic diffing tools[1,2,3], but I'm not aware of this being widely used in any VCS.

Nowadays, with all the machine learning advances, the ideal VCS should also use ML to understand the change at a deeper level, and maybe even suggest improvements. If AI can write code for me, it could surely understand what I'm trying to do, and help me so that version control is entirely hands-free, instead of having to fight with it, and be constantly aware of it, as I have to do now.

I just finished watching the presentation, and Pijul seems like an iterative improvement over Git. Nothing jumped out at me like a killer feature that would make me want to give it a try. It might be because the author focuses too much on technical details, instead of taking a step back and rethinking what a modern VCS tool should look like today.

[1]: https://semanticdiff.com/

[2]: https://github.com/trailofbits/graphtage

[3]: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree

There’s also gumtree: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree/wiki/Languages

GumTree does AST level diffing, hypothetically one could build VCS on top of that. That would work for binary files as long as they are parseable to some sort of sensible AST.

https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree

There are a few AST-based diffing programs e.g. GumTreeDiff. I haven't tried any of them though.