Re: [GSoC] org-merge-driver weekly update

[Robert Horn <rjhorn@alum.mit.edu>]

Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:

> On 6.6.2012, at 15:50, Andrew Young wrote:
> As a general remark, if you implement things like aggressive resorting,
> I think it would be good to have such features optional, in some
> way configurable.  Turning off all bells would then do a simple stable
> outline tree inserting like you have in your prototype.  Increasing
> complexity can and should be implemented, but I would like them optional
> for users (opt-out is OK).
>

I agree.  I'm thinking about a problem that I routinely have.  I work on
multiple computers capturing notes into journals that are date-trees.  I
resynchronize these journals using git, and git is often confused about
what to do when it sees the same base tree with different additions from
the different computers.

In my usage there are never deletes, and I would expect that the order
of headlines in the original versions would be preserved as the order of
those headlines in the merged version.  I don't get out of order
headlines because the capture function manages the date tree for me.

If I had an improperly ordered input I would prefer to have the merger
fail and ask for manual help.  If it's out of order that means either
something went wrong with the capture function, or I manually did
something that I might want preserved.  For instance, I might archive
the 2010 notes into some other file, and replace them with a link to
that file.  I would want to preserve this.  (Actually the issue of how
to manage such archival is one that I haven't given much thought, since
disk space is cheap and it's easy to collapse the old stuff.)

Robert Horn