Question

Git is smart and will “follow” changes in history to make merging easier and auto merge more for me. Conflicts are delineated by the lines that have not changed around the change. With K&R you get no ambiguous lines that have only “{” in them like you would in B&D. How would I test the limit of the context sensitivity that Git has in terms of the lines that surround a change?

I want to avoid resolving conflicts that I may not need to. But I need some way to test how many potential conflicts I will save by switching to K&R and the additional context it brings.

So far, Git is too smart to get fooled by trivial examples.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

So this is the closest thing I have found so far as evidence to this.
http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Bram-Cohen-speaks-up-about-patience-diff-td2277041.html

The e-mail is discussing the purpose of the “patience” algorithm in Git. In it Bram explains how superfluous matching lines can create nasty conflicts that can be tough to resolve but only in the case of fairly complex merges involving large patches. In other words simple contrived examples will fail to show this behavior.

While he does also mention things like End affecting the results it makes some sense to infer that placing an opening brace on it’s own line increases the number of superfluous matching lines possibly resulting in a greater probability of these conflicts.

I’d say this isn’t iron-clad, but it does lend some credence to this theory.

So ‘unique lines’ is a simple cross-language proxy for ‘unimportant
lines’.

That quote stands out to me in this discussion, since we are basically matching on what we feel are important lines that are supposed to give us context, however a brace by itself is not important and provides no context.