Re: Common ancestor in merge diffs?

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Jan 26, 2009, 19:52 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LNX.1.00.0901261412110.19665@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0901261100200.5284@localhost.localdomain>

On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> >
> > I was just doing an annoying merge (I'd reorganized code while other 
> > people made changes to it), and I kept having the problem that it was hard 
> > to figure out what each side had done. Is there some way to ask git for 
> > the diffs between the common ancestor (which is unique in my case, so it's 
> > actually useful) and each of the sides of the merge? Ideally, it would 
> > give essentially the converse of the --cc diff: first column is -stage 1 
> > +stage 2; second column is -stage 1 +stage 3.
> 
> Have you tried "gitk --merge [filename]"?
> 
> That's usually even more useful - because it doesn't just give a diff, it 
> gives the actual commits that caused the conflict. That way you see what 
> both sides of a merge tried to do.. It's what I do when encountering 
> conflicts on the kernel (where I'm usually not the author of _either_ side 
> of the code that causes a conflict), and it really is very powerful.

That is really nice, and quite handy. I ended up getting approximately that effect with blame and show, but gitk is much easier. For some reason, I never think of the graphical tools. Is there an easy way of focusing on the changes that end up in a particular conflict? Half of the work was finding the right commit and finding the right part of the diff.

	-Daniel
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