Live-share: Unable to share merge tool

[yawnbranham]

When trying to perform a merge and resolve merge conflicts the other participants cannot access the merge tool to resolve conflicts.

Product and Version VS 2017 Professional:
OS Version Windows:
Live Share Extension Version: Latest

Steps to Reproduce / Scenario:

1. Start a live share and invite other participant
2. Merge changes between 2 branches
3. Recieve message saying "The target participant is not currently editing a shared document"

[lostintangent]

@yawnbranham Thanks for reporting this! Unfortunately, the merge tool window in VS isn’t currently shared, and so guests wouldn’t be able to see it (which is why you’re seeing this message).

Resolving merge conflicts collaboratively is a really compelling scenario, and so we’ll use this issue to track adding support for sharing the merge tool window. Thanks!

[dscho]

Maybe as a quick stop-gap solution, would it be possible to add a menu item to the context menu of the tab to add it to the set of shared tabs?

[lostintangent]

@dscho I wish it was that simple. Unfortunately, we currently only share files on disk. In this scenario, the merge window is effectively a custom "designer" that Live Share doesn't know about. We definitely want to support this, but there isn't currently a simple workaround to enable it.

[dscho]

@lostintangent thanks for the explanation. I actually came here because I was interested to see how I could Live Share, say, a commit message or a todo list of an interactive rebase when I call a Git command in the shared terminal with GIT_EDITOR="code --wait". These files are on disk, so by what you said, that use case should be easier to support than the mergetool?

[lostintangent]

@dscho Ah, yeah apologies, I was referring to the VS behavior above. If you started an interactive rebase, then yes, the todo file is actually on disk. However, we currently exclude the contents of the .git directory from the sharing session, which results in the rebase todo file not being shareable. So it’s a similar symptom, but for a slightly different reason.

@jasongin Is there a way for a user to explicitly choose to share the git-rebase-todo file (located in the .git/rebase-merge directory)? I just tried a negative exclude in the .vsls.json file, and it didn’t seem to work. This seems like a compelling scenario for Live Share, so it would be great to know if there’s a workaround, or whether we should discuss the rebase-merge directory being hidden but not excluded (possibly along with the .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG file as well?). That way a host could share it with others, without it being visible in the tree.

[alexgorbatchev]

When the host has merge conflicts, participants see incomplete view...

[lostintangent]

Visual Studio is re-doing much of its git/version control experience, and so we're likely to add Live Share support to the new merge experience. Additionally, we haven't heard significant interest in this over the last couple of years, so I'm going to close this for now. Please re-open it if this is something that we should continue to track 👍