Subject: Re: [PATCH] merge-tree: fix "same file added in subdir"

From: John Keeping <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:34:58 +0000

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:57:39PM +0000, John Keeping wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 03:42:40PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > John Keeping <[email-masked]> writes:
> > 
> > > When the same file is added with identical content at the top level,
> > > git-merge-tree prints "added in both" with the details.  But if the file
> > > is added in an existing subdirectory, threeway_callback() bails out early
> > > because the two trees have been modified identically.
> > >
> > > In order to detect this, we need to fall through and recurse into the
> > > subtree in this case.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: John Keeping <[email-masked]>
> > 
> > The rationale the above description gives is internally consistent,
> > but it is rather sad to see this optimization go.  The primary
> > motivation behind this program, which does not use the usual
> > unpack-trees machinery, is to allow us to cull the identical result
> > at a shallow level of the traversal when the both sides changed (not
> > added) a file deep in a subdirectory hierarchy.
> > 
> > The patch makes me wonder if we should go the other way around,
> > resolving the "both added identically" case at the top cleanly
> > without complaint.
> 
> I don't use merge-tree so I have no opinion on this, just wanted to fix
> an inconsistency :-)

Having re-read the manpage, I think you're right that we should just
resolve the "both added identically" case cleanly, but I wonder whether
some of the other cases should also be resolved cleanly.

git-merge-tree(1) says:

    the output from the command omits entries that match the <branch1>
    tree.

so you could argue that "added in branch1", "changed in branch1,
unmodified in branch2" and "removed in branch1, unchanged in branch2"
should also print no output.

But as I said above I don't use git-merge-tree so perhaps people who do
would like to explain what they expect in these cases.