Merging Mercurial conflicts in Netbeans

Question

If you look in the image below..

The top left is my changes:

$static_pages = 'terms|privacy|about|home|media';

The top right is some one elses changes.

$static_pages = 'terms|privacy|about|home|history';

And the bottom is the result after merge.

It wants me to pick one and discard the other. The way it should actually be merged is:

$static_pages = 'terms|privacy|about|home|history|media';

However, there is no way (that I can tell) for me to select that.

I tried to select one of the two, then make the appropriate changes in the bottom window, but it would not let me make any edits.

I had to select one, save it, then reopen the file and add the rest and save again. This doesn't seem right. Am I doing something wrong or is that just the way it is?

Answer 1

It appears to be the way it is: the Mercurial guide has a dead link to #resolving anchor that doesn't exist! :-) In the corresponding Subversion guide, the anchor is there, but they only say that you can select the version you want.

It has been asked before on the NetBeans Forums and the reply was that it's a known limitation and that you'll have to hand-edit the file afterwards. Luckily hg merge and hg commit are separate commands in Mercurial, so you have the opportunity to fix the conflict before committing.

However, since it can be impossible to remember all the files that need editing, I strongly agree with DMA5761 when he suggest using a more capable three-way merge tool, such as the KDiff3 that comes with TortoiseHg.