Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] diff-merges: improve --diff-merges documentation

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 7, 2023, 06:49 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqmswv3p11.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqjzrz5hgn.fsf@gitster.g>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> In my opinion, --remerge-diff does this better; wouldn't we want a
>> ...
> I personally find that a very trivial merge resolution is far easier
> to read with --cc than --remerge-diff, the latter being way too
> verbose.
>
> Also, --cc and -c should work inside a read-only repository where
> you only have read access to.  If remerge needs to write some
> objects to the repository, then you'd need some hack to give a
> writable object store overlay via the alternate odb mechanism, or
> something, right?

Well, the above did not come out as well as I intended, as I forgot to prefix it with something I thought was obvious from what I said in the recent discussion in the earlier iteration of this topic, where I said that it would be "--remerge-diff", if I were to pick an option that is so useful that it deserves short and sweet single letter. Narutally, it came after we gained experience with "--cc", so it would be surprising if it did worse. Just like it is natural to expect that "--cc" would give more useful output than "-m -p" that predates everybody else.

In short, I would say "--remerge-diff" would give output that is the easiest to grok among the three modern variants to show the changes a merge introduces.

The above two cases, where I said cc does better than remerge-diff, were meant as _exceptions_ for that general sentiment.