You are viewing bramcohen

Mon, Apr. 18th, 2011, 06:52 pm
zooko: "confusing crap" vs. "nice example"

Dear Bram:

One man's "confusing crap" is another man's "nice example". I have always found your revert-based example to be, while technically interesting, not the sort of thing that I imagine running into a lot in practice. (Like you say, If it hurts when you do that then don't do that!) Also I tend to get confused when you get to the criss-cross scenario.

On the other hand my bugfix-based example that you link to at the top illustrates an issue that is relevant to pretty much every merge. The only reason people don't notice it in practice is that usually the "fuzzy target selection" algorithm gets lucky. That's the one in which you search for a hunk in the target which is near where the original hunk was located or has some of the same neighboring lines of code as the original hunk had.

Anyway, I'm kind of irritated that you alluded to my nice example (or possibly to Russell O'Connor's extension of it) as "confusing" and "crap". If you can think of a simplification or a clarification of the bugfix-based example, I would be interested to see it. Your revert-based example is not that, though--it is a different thing.



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