Re: A note on merging conflicts..

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

I actually don't think that expression makes any sense.

	$(merge-base A B)..B

as an expression only makes sense if there is a single point of forking, and no contact apart from that. In that case, what you suggest makes sense, because doing

	git diff A...B

is exactly what you want. 

HOWEVER. If there has been any other merges in between (but they aren't merge-bases because either branch _also_ did other things), your A...B expression is meaningless, I think. To do a diff in that case, you really need to do my "merge+diff" thing, and no amount of "A...B" expressions on a commit relationship level can be meaningful.

Now, the expression

	A...B == B...A == A B --not $(git-merge-base --all A B)

is meaningful (and the one I want for merges), but it's largely useless for anything else. It just means "the set of all commits that aren't trivially in both" (it's not strictly a valid set operation, but it approaches being an "xor" instead of a union or an intersection or a difference).

But the above isn't useful for "git diff" and friends any more, it's mainly just for merging.

			Linus