From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:31:02 GMT
Subject: Re: git-core: conflictstyle=diff3 doesn't actually use diff3 compatible format
Message-ID: <7vpr3itn89.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20100305221950.GB5083@progeny.tock>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

>> I can't live without conflictstyle=diff3m and I'm very happy it exists.
>> But it has a little problem: it uses "|||||||\n" as a separator for the
>> ancestor version of the text, whereas diff3 uses "||||||| <ancestorname>\n".
>> The difference is harmless for a human (tho the <ancestorname> can sometimes
>> be useful, assuming it's meaningful), but it makes some tools fail to
>> recognize the conflict markers properly.
>> So please add a " BASE" or " ANCESTOR" after the "|||||||".
>
> No opinion on this myself.  I’d be interested to hear from xdiff people
> whether it should be easy to add the ancestor name to the output.

I don't think there was any xdiff people involved in this area.

I suspect that our tools actually rely on the common ancestor markers not
having any extra cruft after them, so it would be introducing a bug if you
change this output without changing the places that read them (I know
about "rerere", but there may be others).