Re: Joining Repositories

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Petr Baudis wrote:

Yes. It can. However, the git merge approach fundamentally expects that the merged trees _converge_.

So what happens is that if two trees continue to be developed as separate trees, and the merges never converge (ie they happen just one way, with the other way seldom or never merging back), the merge strategy will get increasingly bad.

That's pretty unavoidable, btw. I can pretty much guarantee that nobody else will really do it any better, although any particular strategy will always handle one particular case perfectly (*).

			Linus

(*) I think merging is like scheduling: you can always find a perfect scheduling algorithm _after_the_fact_ when you know the load, but finding one that works for all loads inevitably means that some cases won't work well. You also find scheduling getting an inordinate amount of time in CS literature, while in real life it's one of the least important problems of a kernel.