On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 12:12:06PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > That is a slight layering violation, in that we are making assumptions > > about how the diffcore-rename subsystem works. > > I do not think I have to say any more than that. The special case we want > to have is for the "empty to empty" case and nothing else, and I do not > want to see people having to remember to look at the merge-recursive code > if/when rename detection starts to treat "empty to small" as "rename with > minor modification." Here's a 2-patch series to replace the old 3/3 (they go on top of the first two cleanups from the previous iteration). [1/2]: teach diffcore-rename to optionally ignore empty content [2/2]: merge-recursive: don't detect renames of empty files Thinking on this more, it is actually a more generic problem than just empty files. It is really a problem of having generic placeholder files with the same content. So a fully general solution would be something like a gitattribute for "don't do renames on this". However, in practice, these placeholder files are empty (since any non-empty file is likely to actually have different content). So I think just dropping the empty files as rename candidates is a pretty good heuristic, and it's nice and simple. After responding to Jonathan, I'm on the fence about whether diff should follow the same heuristic. I left the diff behavior unchanged, but a 3/2 that turns it off by default would be a trivial one-liner. -Peff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html