There is this internal library where we've been working on four branches. Call them devel, feature-a, feature-b, and feature-c. All three feature branches are significant and long running, but they have at least had the incremental improvements and bug fixes from devel regularly merged back in.
Recently feature-a and feature-b were merged to devel (by someone else, yeah!). Which means that devel now has large changes relative feature-c. Now, I'm one of the folks working on feature-c and I spent a little while today trying a "what-if" merge of devel into that branch. It wasn't as bad as I feared (because much of this branch is working on different parts of the code than the others), but it was bad.
While I was staring at the merge tool showing another set of conflicting changes without (a) recognising either change as one I had done or (b) understanding the intent behind either occured to me that it would be really nice to be able to ...
Frob1 a highlighted (i.e. changed) section of text to obtain a quick peak at the relevant change logs.
In the simplest form you would see the change summaries from the current commit back to the common anscenstor for each branch; better would be filtering only those commits that touched the current file, and best would be filtering those that involve the lines in question. Being able to drill down on interesting summaries is a bonus feature.
At that point—assuming your team writes reasonable commit messages—you have a fighting chance of sussing out the intent of the changes and thereby a better chance of choosing the right merge action. Of course, I can (and do) check those logs in a couple of terminals kept handy, but UI sugar can improve the experience.
This seemed like something someone might already have implemented, but my Google-fu wasn't up to finding it (or reliably eleminating the possibility). Anyone know?
1 Hover over, center click on, or something. Ask a UI specialist to help.
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