Re: [PATCH 00/48] Handling more corner cases in merge-recursive.c

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> writes:

> It does sound potentially expensive, though, and might mean a lot
> more work in merge-recursive to handle that extra information.  Is that a
> path we want to take at some point?

Probably you can start with backend specific option (e.g. -Xbreak=yes) to
experiment. We made recursive the default not because it deals with
renames (in a broken way) but primarily because it handles criss-cross
better; at some point we might also want to add another backend specific
option (e.g. -Xrename=off) to allow the users to keep the "recursive"
aspect of the strategy while declining a more expensive (and brittle)
rename handling to take effect.

My gut feeling is that -Xbreak=yes, once the code does work well enough,
would have to become the default. It would make the default mode of merge
possibly quite expensive but it is Ok as long as we give projects with
simple/clean history an easy way to use either "recursive -Xrename=off" or
even "resolve" to avoid cost that is unnecessary to handle their needs.