Re: [PATCH 0/3] Teach Git about the patience diff algorithm

> On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 10:00:07PM +0000, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > Therefore I counted the lines between conflict markers (actually, a perl 
> > script did).  Of these 66 merges, on average patience merge produced 
> > 4.46774193548387 _fewer_ lines between conflict markers.
> > 
> > Take that with a grain of salt, though: the standard deviation of this 
> > difference is a hefty 121.163046639509 lines.
> > 
> > The worst case for patience diff was the merge 
> > 4698ef555a1706fe322a68a02a21fb1087940ac3, where the --cc diff line counts 
> > are 1300 (without) vs 1301 (with patience merge), but the lines between 
> > conflict markers are 197 vs a ridiculous 826 lines!
> > 
> > But you should take that also with a grain of salt: this merge is a 
> > _subtree_ merge, and my test redid it as a _non-subtree_ merge.
> > 
> > So I restricted the analysis to the non-subtree merges, and now 
> > non-patience merge comes out 6.97297297297297 conflict lines fewer than 
> > patience merge, with a standard deviation of 58.941106657867 (with a total 
> > count of 37 merges).
> > 
> > Note that ~7 lines difference with a standard deviation of ~59 lines is 
> > pretty close to ~0 lines difference.
> > 
> > In the end, the additional expense of patience merge might just not be 
> > worth it.
> 
> Depends, if it can help generating nicer merges, it's good to have.
> 
> We could have an option to git-merge that tries hard to generate the
> smallest conflict possible.