Edward Thomson <ethom...@microsoft.com> writes:

> Junio C Hamano [mailto:gits...@pobox.com] wrote:
>> Edward Thomson <ethom...@microsoft.com> writes:
>> > I would propose that this not simply track rename conflicts, but all
>> > conflicts.
>> 
>> That is a no starter.
>
> So.  Can you explain to me why this would be a non starter?

At least two, IIRC.  One is the consequence of the other.

We do not gratuitously break existing implementations.  If no
conflict is stored as higher-stage index entries in an index that
has your index extension, no existing implementation can read a
conflicted index written by your implementation and have users
resolve conflicts.

When a path originally at A is moved to B on only one branch, and
there are content-level conflicts between the changes made by one
branch (while going from A to B) and by the other branch (while
keeping it at A), we would end up having three stages for path B
without any trace of path A.  I do not offhand know how much it
helps to learn A in such a situation in the real life, but we are
indeed losing information, and I do not have any problem with an
extension that records in the index the fact that in the two (of the
three) commits involved in the merge, the path was at A.

But people have been successfully using existing versions of Git
without that information to merge branches with renames, and
resolving the content-level conflicts.  Your tool that
_additionally_ records "This path that currently has three stages
for B was at A in the common ancestor (i.e. stage #1) and that
branch (either stage #2 or stage #3)" does not _have_ _to_ break
these users by removing the three stages for B from the main index.

Also we do not duplicate information unnecessarily.  Nowhere in the
above "we have been losing the fact that two of the three had the
contents we have at path B in the resulting unmerged index at path
A, and that information might be useful as well", there is a reason
to write another copy of mode or SHA-1 for any of the three variants.

As I said, you do not live in the world where you are writing
something like Git from scratch.  Perhaps you do, but then the
result will not be Git and we wouldn't be discussing that system on
this mailing list.




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