Git merge using patience diff?

Git merge using patience diff?

[chombee]

Hey,

Is it possible to get git to use patience diff when merging?

My version of git is 1.5.*, from before git diff had the --patience
option. I got git diff to use bzr's implementation of patience diff via
GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF. But when merging git still seems to use its normal
diff. Will I need to write my own merge driver that uses patience diff?

Thanks

Re: Git merge using patience diff?

[Jonathan Nieder]

Hi,

chombee wrote:

> My version of git is 1.5.*, from before git diff had the --patience
> option. I got git diff to use bzr's implementation of patience diff via
> GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF. But when merging git still seems to use its normal
> diff. Will I need to write my own merge driver that uses patience diff?

You will need to if you want that functionality.  By the way, if you
write a clean patch that adds a git-merge-patience program to git.git
so one can use ‘git merge -s patience’ out of the box, I imagine you
would find some appreciative users.

You could even piggy-back on merge-recursive to do most of the work
(and share a main() function and so on), like merge-subtree did: see
commit 68faf689 (A new merge strategy 'subtree', 2007-02-15) in
git.git.

You might also be interested in the patches at
<http://bugs.debian.org/522361>, which add patience diff support to
git add --patch and friends (and are sitting in limbo until I find
a chance to write some tests for them).

Hope that helps,
Jonathan