Note on implementing Symmetric Merge

[Stefan Fuhrmann <st...@alice-dsl.de>]

Hi Julian & interested parties,

I had this issue popping up and no clear idea
where to put it in the wiki - so I'm posting it here.

Since symmetric merge has more freedom in
choosing base and merge order, the meaning
of "base", "mine", "theirs" etc. might become
ambiguous if they are being derived automatically
from the diff3 being executed. I simply want
to note that we might need to explicitly tell
the wc which input has which meaning for a
given merge step.

-- Stefan^2.

Re: Note on implementing Symmetric Merge

[Julian Foad <ju...@btopenworld.com>]

Stefan Fuhrmann wrote:

> Since symmetric merge has more freedom in
> choosing base and merge order, the meaning
> of "base", "mine", "theirs" etc. might become
> ambiguous if they are being derived automatically
> from the diff3 being executed. I simply want
> to note that we might need to explicitly tell
> the wc which input has which meaning for a
> given merge step.

Yes, a fair point that the terms might become more ambiguous and inconsistent than they already are, so we may need to be more explicit.

- Julian