Merge This! is a test suite for revision control tools designed to stress test their merge algorithms. Think of it as an Acid3 test for version control systems.
All version control systems have a notion of merging two separate development branches. One measure of a VCS's quality is how well it handles merges. Is it able to merge two branches without manual conflict resolution? Does the code still behave correctly after automatic resolution? If a conflict does require manual resolution, how complicated is the conflict?
Merge This! has a number of small test cases representing typical development patterns which might cause merge conflicts. Each VCS performs the merge and we evaluate the results. The goal is to codify many software revision patterns in this fashion.
Each test case contains one small C program. The branches modify this program in different ways. For a test to pass all of the following must work:
- VCS automatically merges the two branches (no manual intervention)
- the C program compiles
- the compiled C program produces correct output
Failing earlier in this list is better. The worst possible scenario is a VCS that silently resolves a merge but does it in a way that breaks your program at runtime (I hope you have a good test suite :-)
The tests support these tools: bzr, darcs, git, hg. To test a tool, run the appropriate make target:
$ make git
| Bazaar | Darcs | Git | Mercurial | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| adjacent-changes | Fail | Ok | Fail | Fail |
| dual-renames | Fail | Ok | Fail | Fail |
| indent-block | Fail | Fail | Ok | Fail |
| move-modify | Ok | Ok | Ok | Ok |
| nearby-changes | Ok | Ok | Ok | Ok |
| same-change | Ok | Ok | Ok | Ok |