Question

Is there some merge strategy or program which is aware of key-value stores, in the sense that the sequence of the lines does not matter*? For a real example, jEdit does not keep the order of options, so there are hundreds of lines which are shuffled around. It would be nice to diff/merge these without having to sort the file first, for example to see how values are changed and keys are added/removed by configuration modifications while the program is running.

* I know it matters for some file types, like shell scripts where you can have references to other keys. These of course should be merged normally.

Answer 1

if the stores are unsorted then comparing them will cost O(n*m) time, if you first sort them you can run it in O(n log n + m log m) for the sort plus O(n+m) for the check, so if the stores are reasonably large then sorting is way faster