Which SCM/VCS cope well with moving text between files?
- by pfctdayelise
We are having havoc with our project at work, because our VCS is doing some awful merging when we move information across files.
The scenario is thus:
You have lots of files that, say, contain information about terms from a dictionary, so you have a file for each letter of the alphabet.
Users entering terms blindly follow the dictionary order, so they will put an entry like "kick the bucket" under B if that is where the dictionary happened to list it (or it might have been listed under both B, bucket and K, kick).
Later, other users move the terms to their correct files. Lots of work is being done on the dictionary terms all the time.
e.g. User A may have taken the B file and elaborated on the "kick the bucket" entry. User B took the B and K files, and moved the "kick the bucket" entry to the K file. Whichever order they end up getting committed in, the VCS will probably lose entries and not "figure out" that an entry has been moved.
(These entries are later automatically converted to an SQL database. But they are kept in a "human friendly" form for working on them, with lots of comments, examples etc. So it is not acceptable to say "make your users enter SQL directly".)
It is so bad that we have taken to almost manually merging these kinds of files now, because we can't trust our VCS. :(
So what is the solution? I would love to hear that there is a VCS that could cope with this. Or a better merge algorithm? Or otherwise, maybe someone can suggest a better workflow or file arrangement to try and avoid this problem?
