Subject: Re: [PATCH] doc: merge: improve conflict presentation docs

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 May 2023 15:35:57 -0700

"Adam Johnson via GitGitGadget" <[email-masked]> writes:

> From: Adam Johnson <[email-masked]>
>
> Improvements:
>
> 1. Remove the sexist example ("Barbie... wants to go shopping")

"Barbie goes shopping" is a pretty common meme.  A random internet
search finds many of them, e.g.

  https://featuredanimation.com/barbie-memes/

If it is about only Barbie herself, not about any other random girls,
would it still be a "sexist" example?

> 2. Show real merge marker contents, rather than e.g. "yours:sample.txt".

I am a bit torn about this change.  While I can see why we may want
to show sample output that is bit-for-bit-faithful to reality, these
examples are written to teach what each part of the output means,
and comments like "yours:sample.txt" are used instead of the actual
conflict marker comments to be more helpful for illustrative
purposes, and this change goes directly against it.

> 3. Swap yours/theirs terms for source/target.

I am not sure if this change is as an improvement, especially in the
context of "git merge", which you merge their work into your history
[*].  Surely, it *is* possible to rephase what I just said to "you
merge source's work into target's history", but it makes the primary
point of doing a merge less clear.  But others may have different
opinions, so please do not take this as the final rejection on this
point.

Thanks.

[Footnote]
* Conflicts during "git rebase" is a different matter.  You
  tentatively put your feet in the shoes of your upstream people,
  whom you can call "them", and replay "your" changes on top of
  "their" work, and a conflict you will see during this process is
  what "they" will see, i.e. while you are resolving such a
  conflict, you are playing the role of your upstream people, and
  the conflict you see is shown from their point of view.  In that
  context, "your" vs "their" may be suboptimal.