Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > You could make it "1234<AB|5=AX><C|=C><DE|6=YE>789", and that is > technically correct (what there were in the shared original for the > conflicted part is 5 and then 6), but the representation pretends > that it knows more than there actually is information, which may be > somewhat misleading. All these three are equally plausible split of > the original "56": > > 1234<AB|=AX><C|=C><DE|56=YE>789 > 1234<AB|5=AX><C|=C><DE|6=YE>789 > 1234<AB|56=AX><C|=C><DE|=YE>789 > > and picking one over others would be a mere heuristic. All three > are technically correct representations and it is just the matter of > which one is the easiest to understand. So, this is the kind of > "misleading but not incorrect". I forgot to say that youu could even do something silly like: 1234<AB|=AX><C|56=C><DE|=YE>789 ;-) > In all these cases, the middle part would look like this: > > <<<<<<< ours > C > ||||||| base > ======= > C > >>>>>>> theirs > > in order to honor the explicit "I want to view all three versions to > examine the situation" aka "--conflict=diff3" option. We cannot > reduce it to just "C". That will make it "not just misleading but > is actively wrong". I also forgot to say that the issue is the same to reduce 1234<AB|=AX><C|=C><DE|56=YE>789 to 1234<A|=A><B|=X><C|=C><D|56=Y><E|=E>789 which is unconditionally correct and then for all x reduce <x|=x> to x, yielding 1234A<B|=X>C<D|56=Y>E789 which your zealous-diff3 would do. So squashing that <C|=C> in the middle would be consistent if you take the zealous-diff3 route. But again, that is discarding the information of the original, which the user explicitly asked from "diff3 -m", i.e. show all three to examine the situation. If the user wants to operate _without_ the original, the user would have asked for "RCS merge" style output, so I am still not sure if that is a sensible mode of operation for diff3 to begin with. -- 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