Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 17:44 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0607271038520.4168@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20060727172329.GC13776@pasky.or.cz>

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Petr Baudis wrote:

> 
>   That said, Git still requires RCS for the merge operation. Any plans
> to finally switch to diff3 and toss out another useless dependency?

If libxdiff ever gets a real 3-way merge, I think we'd do it in a heartbeat.

Right now it has a function called "xdl_merge3()", but it doesn't actually have anythign to do with a real merge:

  "The function works by creating a differential between mmfo and mmf2 and
   by applying the resulting patch to mmf1"

so it's really just a "diff + patch".

I asked Davide about it some time ago, and I think he said that he'd like to do it properly, but it's always been on his back-burner and that he didn't foresee that changing in the immediate future..

So we can hope. Or somebody who knows the algorithms could just implement it and send it to both us and Davide (libxdiff _is_ LGPL, btw).

		Linus