4. Conflict resolution

Introduction

Under normal circumstances, the users collaborate in one project. They send and receive their changes regularly. At times it may occur that two users make changes in the same chapter of text, or in the same project notes. After doing Send/Receive, a conflict may arise. Bibledit-Gtk does not know which of the two edits to take, either the edit of the first user or the edit of the second user. This is called a conflict. For Bible text, Bibledit-Gtk tries to resolve this conflict automatically, keeping one edit, and throwing away the other. But for project notes, this does not always work. Manual intervention is required to resolve this conflict.The rest of this page describes how to notice that a conflict has occurred in a project note, and how to manually resolve it.

Symptoms

The first symptom of a conflict is that the users get the impression that the collaboration system has stopped to work properly. The users make their edits. But these edits and changes do not propagate to the other users.If a conflict is suspected, then it is good to find out about it, whether this is indeed the case. A simple way of finding out is this:1. Shut down Bibledit, and start it again. This clears the system log.2. Send and receive the project notes. Do this through menu File / Project notes / Send-Receive.3. View the system log to see whether a conflict has occurred. Do this through menu Help / System log.If there is a conflict, then the log shows something along those lines:Auto-merging 78294313CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in 78294313Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.The log shows that there is a conflict. Notice the number: 78294313. This is the number of the project note that has the conflict.

Resolution

There are several ways to resolve the conflict. A simple one is described below. It just throws away the edits that one user made, and takes the edits that the other users made. In other words, it takes the version that is already on the server, in the remote repository.The user who has the conflict does the following:Opens a terminal, and types the following series of commands, one by one, and presses Enter after each command:cdcd .bibleditcd notescd datagit checkout --theirs 78294313Notice that the number of the note that has the conflict is 78294313. This only works in this example. Your note number will be different. The note number was found above.Close the terminal.Start doing the sending and receiving in Bibledit-Gtk as usual. Collaboration should work again. You may view the system log, as described above, to ascertain that everything works well again.