Re: baffled again

Tony Luck [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

 * Even if it does always choose the nicer choice of the two,
   Tony was lucky (no pun intended).  Rather, we were lucky that
   Tony was observant.  A careless merger may well have easily
   missed this mismerge (from the human point of view).

Actually I can't take credit here. This was a case of the "many-eyes" of
open source working at its finest ... someone e-mailed me and told me
that I should have backed out the old patch before applying the new one.
While typing the e-mail to say that I already had in the release branch,
I found the problem that it had been "lost" in the merge into the test
branch.

But this is a good reminder that merging is not a precise science, and
there is more than one plausible merge in many situations ... and while
GIT will pick the one that you want far more often than not, there is
the possibility that it will surprise you.  Maybe there should be a note
to this effect in the tutorial.  Git is not magic, nor is it imbued with
DWIM technology.

I have to disagree. If in some corner case it can do the wrong thing, no
amount of "I told you so in the docu!" will save the day. People /will/
overlook it, or be bitten when they have all but forgotten about it.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513