Re: [PATCH] Fall back to three-way merge when applying a patch.

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Oct 6, 2005, 14:59 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0510060756060.31407@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <m1wtkqk89a.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com>

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> 
> After thinking about it I don't think you need to look through the
> history to use it for a merge3 operation.   As I recall merge3 only
> looks at the base and the two derived versions of the file.  If we
> have the sha1 of the original in the git repository I think all we
> need to compute is the diff between that sha1 the current version
> file.  And then apply the merge3 algorithm to combine the two sets of
> changes.

Ahh, that I can definitely agree with. In fact, it makes perfect sense.

However, it assumes that everybody is a git user, which isn't actually true. Also, I'm wondering whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages: it would make the diff uglier. We'd have to add that SHA1 there somewhere (either on the "diff" line itself, or as anothe rextended git line like the "rename from/to" lines - a "original <sha1>" line).

		Linus