Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] diff-merges: improve --diff-merges documentation

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2023 23:49:46 -0700

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:

> Elijah Newren <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> In my opinion, --remerge-diff does this better; wouldn't we want a
>> ...
> I personally find that a very trivial merge resolution is far easier
> to read with --cc than --remerge-diff, the latter being way too
> verbose.
>
> Also, --cc and -c should work inside a read-only repository where
> you only have read access to.  If remerge needs to write some
> objects to the repository, then you'd need some hack to give a
> writable object store overlay via the alternate odb mechanism, or
> something, right?

Well, the above did not come out as well as I intended, as I forgot
to prefix it with something I thought was obvious from what I said
in the recent discussion in the earlier iteration of this topic,
where I said that it would be "--remerge-diff", if I were to pick an
option that is so useful that it deserves short and sweet single
letter.  Narutally, it came after we gained experience with "--cc",
so it would be surprising if it did worse.  Just like it is natural
to expect that "--cc" would give more useful output than "-m -p"
that predates everybody else.

In short, I would say "--remerge-diff" would give output that is the
easiest to grok among the three modern variants to show the changes
a merge introduces.

The above two cases, where I said cc does better than remerge-diff,
were meant as _exceptions_ for that general sentiment.