> Should you be counting on confusion of an underpowered text-merge to catch such problems?
This does not really follow from my statement.
I said that underpowered text merge should not silently accept such situations, not that it is the only way to catch them. It doesn't replace knowing something about what you are merging, but it is certainly a good hint that something may be wrong or unexpected.
> Post-merge syntax checks are better for that purpose.
Better, yes, but I was addressing semantic issues, not syntactical. I have seen syntactically valid merges result in semantic inconsistency, it does happen.
I do agree with your last statement.. unit & integration tests, agent checks or whathaveyou, these all contribute to semantic checking, which is a good thing.
Can they be relied on here? Maybe? I guess the jury is still out. My testing philosophy is "you can only test for what you think of testing". And tests and agent checks have a signal to noise ratio, and are only as useful as their SNR allows.
There is no guaranteed way to stop bugs from happening, if there were it likely would have been discovered by now. All we can do is take a layered approach to provide opportunities for them to get caught early. Removing one of those layers (merge conflicts) is not clearly a good thing, imho, but who knows.. if agent checks can replace it, then sure, I'm all for it.
This does not really follow from my statement.
I said that underpowered text merge should not silently accept such situations, not that it is the only way to catch them. It doesn't replace knowing something about what you are merging, but it is certainly a good hint that something may be wrong or unexpected.
> Post-merge syntax checks are better for that purpose.
Better, yes, but I was addressing semantic issues, not syntactical. I have seen syntactically valid merges result in semantic inconsistency, it does happen.
I do agree with your last statement.. unit & integration tests, agent checks or whathaveyou, these all contribute to semantic checking, which is a good thing.
Can they be relied on here? Maybe? I guess the jury is still out. My testing philosophy is "you can only test for what you think of testing". And tests and agent checks have a signal to noise ratio, and are only as useful as their SNR allows.
There is no guaranteed way to stop bugs from happening, if there were it likely would have been discovered by now. All we can do is take a layered approach to provide opportunities for them to get caught early. Removing one of those layers (merge conflicts) is not clearly a good thing, imho, but who knows.. if agent checks can replace it, then sure, I'm all for it.