on Thu Mar 22 2012, Martin Geisler <mg-AT-aragost.com> wrote:
No, the number of commits is not important for a three-way merge. This is a very common misunderstanding, though, and many blog posts keep saying this since it sounds intuitively correct.
But the fact is that a three-way merge is concerned with three things only: common ancestor, your version, and my version. The number of commits that went into producing your and my version is irrelevant.
I've written a little about it here:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/8592480/110204 http://stackoverflow.com/a/9500764/110204
It's true that 3-way merge doesn't in practice take things in bits and pieces. That said, I have considerably simplified several nasty merge problems by merging in intermediate commits along the path to the commit I eventually want to merge. An automated tool that could do the same could be very useful for those tough merges (and would be easy to build on top of Git, and, presumably, Mercurial). -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com