Is there a way to avoid simple C/C++ conflicts?

[aroun]

Hi there,

So I often come across the situation where I'm performing a 3-way merge of C/C++ files and a conflict is flagged because both of the changed files have added a new line or lines at the same point in the file.

I realise that this is actually a conflict, but there are cases in C/C++ where this can be trivially resolved. Common cases I see are where multiple include directives are added to a file or multiple variable declarations are added at the same point in a header file.

As an example

Base

#inlcude "foo.h"

My Change

#include "foo.h"
#include "bar.h"

Their change

#include "foo.h"
#include "baz.h"

Result

#include "foo.h"
--- This section marked as conflict ---
#include "bar.h"
#include "baz.h"
--- This section marked as conflict ---

Therefore, is there an option I can set somewhere (possibly C/C++ specific) to supress these simple conflicts?

Any help much appreciated.

Regards

Alan

[Zoë]

Sorry, no. Anything like that would require language-specific knowledge, which BC doesn't currently support.

You should be able to easily take both lines with the "Take Left then Right" or "Take Right then Left" commands though.

[Michael Bulgrien]

I don't know why you would want to, but you could very easily create a regular expression grammar element for include directives (^#include .*$) and mark it as unimportant...then ignore the unimportant changes.

The nice thing about putting it in its own grammar element is that you can always go back to your session settings to toggle the importance setting to choose whether or not you want include directives to trigger a conflict.

The downside of marking a grammar element as unimportant is that you will lose the change. Instead of taking both sides automatically, BC3 will take the center when unimportant conflicts are ignored.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Now, an enhancement request might be to add a merge option to grammar elements. By default, a conflict is raised. But if you configure BC to take a different action on a conflict section based on the type of grammar element in the conflict, that would actually accomplish what you are looking for...

Raise Conflict
Take Left
Take Center
Take Right
Take Left Then Right
Take Right Then Left

I'm not sure that there would be a high demand for such functionality, however. I doubt that it would get implemented.