Re: smerge-ediff "MINE" and "OTHER" monikers unhelpful

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> At any rate, this is what I went with.  Feel free to take it; I have a
>> copyright assignment for Emacs on file.
>
> Installed with minor tweaks, thank you,

I've finally taken the time to take a look at it.  The only user-visible
tweak in my opinion, while unquestionably deliberate, is a mistake: you
decided to shove MINE = ... and OTHER = ... strings into the buffer
names before the identifying strings.

For one thing, smerge-ediff (purportedly as opposed to the smerge-mode
not visibly involved in the user interaction) does not expose _any_ of
the MINE/OTHER terminology to the user, so this is a distraction not
reflecting anything in the ediff-help.  For the usual case of a rebase
along the lines of

git pull -r

it labels the upstream changes as "MINE" and my own changes as "OTHER".

Not helpful.  If there was _any_ point in labelling, one should use A
and B, the actual names used for the ediff keybindings that are active
here.  But it's not usually a puzzler to figure out whether A or B comes
first, so that seems unnecessary.

But worse is that we are talking about the buffer names of buffers in a
horizontally split window.  For the normal terminal line length of 80,
and for a somewhat normal mode line with a non-minimal file name, this
means that the misleading and useless information does not leave _any_
room for the helpful information on the split mode line.

So we are back to where we started from, just in a more complex manner.

-- 
David Kastrup