From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:19:46 GMT
Subject: Re: What's cooking in git.git (topics)
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0807191311220.3305@eeepc-johanness>
In-Reply-To: <7vabge30dh.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hi,

On Fri, 18 Jul 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 18 Jul 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> >
> >> +The 'recursive' strategy can take the following options:
> >> +
> >> +ours;;
> >
> > You still have not addressed the issue that you can specify multiple 
> > strategies,...
> 
> Even though multiple -s parameters are supported, I know you have been 
> here long enough in git scene to remember how it came about.  I've seen 
> some third-party documents that talk about our ability to "try multiple 
> strategies and pick the best one" as one of the unique features, but 
> anybody who was there knows that it was just a failed experiment that we 
> did not bother removing.

I think that we made it hard for that experiment to succeed, by 
disallowing custom merge strategies.

See

http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/SoC2007Ideas#head-cfde15f16950c2579a89cc109762e911546e6fe3

for an idea that would make complete sense as a _fallback_ strategy.  
Fallback, because it is definitely too slow to be the default.

Yes, I agree, if all strategies fail, it is dubitable that we find a 
metric that will always find the "best" one.  But if one fails and the 
next one does not, it is obvious what is correct.

So I still feel that "-s subtree=<blabla>,recursive=theirs" would be a 
viable way to go.  And more intuitive than "-X".

I'll just ask Miklos what he thinks of the idea, and to write the patch if 
he likes it, once he's back from the saddle. :-)

Ciao,
Dscho