Re: baffled again

From: Tony Luck <tony.luck@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 25, 2005, 05:58 UTC
Message-ID: <12c511ca05082422584e6b1bfb@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vzmr63deq.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

>  * Even if it does always choose the nicer choice of the two,
>    Tony was lucky (no pun intended).  Rather, we were lucky that
>    Tony was observant.  A careless merger may well have easily
>    missed this mismerge (from the human point of view).

Actually I can't take credit here. This was a case of the "many-eyes" of open source working at its finest ... someone e-mailed me and told me that I should have backed out the old patch before applying the new one. While typing the e-mail to say that I already had in the release branch, I found the problem that it had been "lost" in the merge into the test branch.

But this is a good reminder that merging is not a precise science, and there is more than one plausible merge in many situations ... and while GIT will pick the one that you want far more often than not, there is the possibility that it will surprise you. Maybe there should be a note to this effect in the tutorial. Git is not magic, nor is it imbued with DWIM technology.

-Tony