Re: Wrong file diff for merge conflict

From: Stefan Bucur <stefan.bucur@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 6, 2009, 14:44 UTC
Message-ID: <8cdebd3f0907060744l75a11160v8b01e6923cc5c70e@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.01.0907051726020.3210@localhost.localdomain>

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:33 AM, Linus Torvalds<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote: [...]

Show 20 quoted lines

>
> The fact is, a traditional rcs three-way merge (which is pretty much what
> you get with git, ignoring the fact that we have other tools in addition
> to it, and ignoring things like criss-cross merges etc) just doesn't work
> the way you seem to think it should work. You simply don't get the
> original of one side by picking one side of the conflict markers. It will
> have merged the stuff that it thought merged cleanly, and not have any
> conflict markers at all for those parts.
>
> Of course, "what it thought merged cleanly" may not be what you want it to
> be. Sometimes you get a clean merge for things that you'd have wanted to
> conflict. And sometimes you get conflicts for stuff that you'd think is
> just silly and shouldn't have.
>
> There are no perfect file merge algorithms that I know of. Lots of people
> hate the diff3/merge behavior - it's by no means perfect. But so far, I've
> never seen anybody successfully advocate anything better either.
>
>                Linus
>

Indeed it seems I had a wrong image of how a conflict file should look. In the light of what you've told me now, everything makes sense :) Thank you very much for taking your time to explain these things!

Cheers, Stefan Bucur