From: Stefan Sperling <stsp@stsp.name>
Subject: Re: show original content in merge conflicts
To: "Todd C. Miller" <Todd.Miller@sudo.ws>
Cc: gameoftrees@openbsd.org
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 16:22:57 +0200

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 07:54:11AM -0600, Todd C. Miller wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Oct 2019 10:31:15 +0200, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> 
> > I have not yet heard any feedback regarding this change.
> > Is nobody interested in this? Should I drop this change or go ahead?
> 
> I'm conflicted (haha).  I do find that I sometimes have to go back
> and look at the original manually and this would save me that step.
> On the other hand, I'm used to the standard markup and am resistent
> to change.  On the whole, I think it is worth doing.
> 
>  - todd

Thanks. I understand your hesitation. I was originally opposed to
this change when it was proposed for Subversion. But I have since
changed my mind about it. It's not as intrusive as one would expect.

I have seen cases where the original content came out empty,
so the conflict looked like this:

<<<<<<<
incoming change
|||||||
=======
local change
>>>>>>>

This happened during rebase and I haven't yet figured out why.
In many instances it seems to work fine though, so I guess this
is an expected result for some inputs. In some cases we have no
other option but running diff3 with an empty original file, so
perhaps it happened during one of those cases.

It might make sense to only show the new marker and original lines
if diff3 actually has some data to show there.