Re: [PATCH] diffcore-rename: favour identical basenames

From: Aidan Van Dyk <aidan@highrise.ca>
Date: Jun 22, 2007, 17:51 UTC
Message-ID: <20070622175117.GA16921@yugib.highrise.ca>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0706221626450.4059@racer.site>

* Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> [070622 13:34]:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, Andy Parkins wrote:
> 
> > What if two files with different filenames and content converge at some 
> > point in history, then diverge again?  If git is tracking renames merely 
> > by content and picks the wrong one, then the history of fileA suddenly 
> > becomes the history of fileB.
> 
> This is becoming highly ethereal. Like "I could imagine that some day in 
> future, some person could devise a device, that might allow you to do 
> something that I can not explain, because I have not even thought of it".
> 
> IOW show me a reasonable example, and we'll talk business.

The one time the "content-only" rename tracking bit me was the after a merge, resulting in conflicts that were un-nessesary:

-*-*-*-*-A-B-C-D
	  \
	   *-E-*

At A, there were 2 files:
	dir1/foo
	dir2/foo
They were template files that happened to be the same in 2 themes.

In E, "foo" was renamed to "foo-bar" in all the template directories.
Git detected this not as 2 renames, but as:
	dir1/foo-bar renamed from dir1/foo
	dir2/foo-bar copied from dir1/foo
	dir2/foo deleted

Meanwhile, work was happening in B, C, and D, changing foo in both templates identically.

When the branch with E was merged back into ABCD, there was a merge conflict with dir2/foo being deleted in one branch, and editit in the other.

In this case, the simple "basename" comparison wouldn't have even been enough.

But the merge was easy enough (because no edits were made in the E branch to those files, just the renames) that I could resolve it easily.

I don't know if preventing this easy-to-fix merge conflict is worth the necessary "likeness of names" necessary to avoid it...

a.

-- 
Aidan Van Dyk                                             Create like a god,
aidan@highrise.ca                                       command like a king,
http://www.highrise.ca/                                   work like a slave.