Resolving conflicts and rejects

Two things leave a file half-merged: an svn update that could not reconcile two versions of a line, and an applied patch whose hunks would not go in. revision resolves both through the same overlay — the side-by-side diff with a decision attached to each block.

Opening it

m in the Files panel opens the resolution overlay. Which view you are in decides what it resolves, and the two are never mixed:

View	m resolves
Changes (or an expanded changelist)	The conflict markers SVN left in the selected file. Only a file with status C has any; Main names the key for you when one is selected.
Rejects	The hunks in the selected .rej, against the file it was written for.
Diffs, or the Changelists overview	Nothing — a saved patch is applied with p, and a changelist is not a file.

Keeping them apart matters, because they are different decisions about different text. A patch can leave a file both conflicted and with a .rej beside it; that is two pieces of work, and you do one in each view. A single overlay only ever holds one kind of block.

Whichever it is, the file is read off disk when you press the key, so what you decide is the file as it actually stands — not anything the panels had cached.

Deciding

Each conflict, or each rejected hunk, is one page of the overlay. The two candidates sit side by side; a few unchanged lines above and below give you the context to judge them.

Key	What it does
1	Take the left side
2	Take the right side
3	Take both, left first
0	Undo the decision
[]	Previous / next block
w	Write the result out
e	Merge it by hand instead
esc	Close without writing

You are not expected to remember any of that. Each pane is headed by what its key does to it — 1 take mine over the left, 2 take r42 over the right, or 1 take working copy and 2 take rejected hunk for a reject — and the two choices that head no pane are spelled out in the footer as 3 take both · 0 undo. A tick marks the side you have taken, and the side you passed over recedes into grey. The title bar counts what is still undecided.

Arrow keys, PgUp / PgDn, g / G and home / end scroll both panes together, exactly as they do in the read-only side-by-side view.

Writing it out

w writes the file back with every block replaced by the side you chose. It is refused while any block is still undecided — a file written half-decided would still hold the markers, or the hunks, you opened it for.

What happens next depends on what you were resolving:

• A conflict is cleared with svn resolve --accept working, which takes the file as it now stands and removes the .mine / .rNN artifacts beside it. The invocation shows up in the Command Log.
• A reject is deleted once its hunks have been dealt with. The target file is left as a normal local modification, to review and commit as usual.

Either way status is re-read, so the Files panel reflects the result immediately.

Merging by hand

e steps out of the overlay and opens the file in your editor, positioned on the block you were looking at. Use it when neither side is right on its own and the merge needs writing rather than picking.

For a conflict the markers are still in the file, so you edit them out as you would from the command line, then clear the conflict with svn resolve. For a reject the editor opens the target file; delete the .rej with d in the Rejects view once you are done with it.

Hunks that no longer fit

A reject’s hunks name the lines they came from, but the file has moved on since — that is why they were rejected. revision therefore places each hunk by matching the text it expects to find, taking the match nearest the line it names.

A hunk whose text is nowhere in the file has no place to go, and neither does one that would land on top of a hunk already placed. Those are counted, reported in a notice, and left in the .rej for you to apply by hand. A reject where none of the hunks fit does not open at all.

Conflicts you would rather not resolve here

The overlay is for text conflicts — the markers SVN writes into a file. Tree conflicts, property conflicts and binary files are not markers in a file and are not offered; resolve those with svn directly:

svn status                              # what is conflicted
svn resolve --accept theirs-full path   # or mine-full, base, working

Then press R in revision to re-read status.