conflict markers in markdown files

Isn't it quite unfortunate that markdown chose setext-style headers by “underlining” with equal signs (=) meaning if a header is 7 characters long it's going to clash with the git conflicts markers (example below).

Would it make sense to add an option to merge-file so merge tools can specify a custom marker that is statistically much less likely to clash with the kinds of text files that are typically stored in git repositories?

cat ./ours.md A Second Level Header --------------------- Ours ======= Its ours The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.

cat ./base.md A Second Level Header --------------------- The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.

cat ./theirs.md A Second Level Header --------------------- Theirs ======= Its theirs The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.

git merge-file -p ./ours.md ./base.md ./theirs.md A Second Level Header --------------------- <<<<<<< ./ours.md Ours ======= Its ours ======= Theirs ======= Its theirs

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.

On 28/10/2021 15:00, Nicholas Bransby-Williams wrote:

In a similar vein, the above `>>>>>>> ./theirs.md` is being formatted as repeated side bars in Thunderbird. But that's someone else's problem ;-)

Nicholas Bransby-Williams <nbransby@gmail.com> writes:

Is the conflict-marker-size attribute sufficient?  If not, why?

In our documentation, we do need to have literal runs of '<<<', '===', etc. to illustrate and describe the conflict markers, so we have these in .gitattributes at the top-level:

    /Documentation/git-merge.txt conflict-marker-size=32
    /Documentation/gitk.txt conflict-marker-size=32
    /Documentation/user-manual.txt conflict-marker-size=32

so that the auto-inserted conflict markers will be very long, instead of just the default (was it 7? I do not remember offhand because I do not have to). Most importantly, these "32" are written by folks who wrote these documentation pages and *knew* that there is no runs of '<', '=', '|' or '>' that are 32 letters long, so it is safe and can be updated to stay safe when the documentation files change.

I guess using such a long marker makes it less likely but there no reason you wouldn't have a 32 character long title in markdown

Example.... :)

An important heading in markdown ================================

On Thu, 28 Oct 2021 at 20:55, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Nicholas Bransby-Williams <nbransby@gmail.com> writes:

You probably missed the part that I said .gitattributes is under control of those who are editing the files the entry refers to. So when you edit the file and add such a line, you can easily edit the attributes file and pick an appropriate number.

Thanks, I didn't miss that.

I have no control over the content in the file so I don't know what an appropriate number is.

Although I guess an unfeasible large one would make a clash highly unlikely.

On Thu, 28 Oct 2021 at 23:28, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Nicholas Bransby-Williams <nbransby@gmail.com> writes:

Those who are editing the file would be able to adjust the attributes themselves, no?

On October 28, 2021 7:11 PM, 

themselves,

It sounds like we might need an attribute like:

*.md	conflict-marker-size=32,conflict-marker-separator='~'

to stick 32 ~ characters as a separator, if going down that path. I'm not sure how hard this would be, but tooling other systems, like JGit and every client on the planet would be painful.

-Randall

<rsbecker@nexbridge.com> writes:

Well, the underline-style markdown headers can use tilde for headers below the level that uses hyphens, so you'd need to pick a different separator letter ;-). I agree that third-party application would have trouble with an arbitrary setting of the marker appearance (note that our own "rerere" knows about the attribute).