Re: A better approach to diffing and merging

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 05:40:02PM -0600, "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." [off-list ref] wrote:

You might look deeper into Darcs development.  This level of 
pluggable "understanding" of the file(s) being modified fits in well with a 
Grand Unified Theory of Patching.  Also "understanding" patches better allows 
Darcs to reorder patches (and calculate "reverse patches") better -- reducing 
the time to do existing automatic merging (or reject the merge as 
non-automatable) and make merges automatic that are currently not handled 
automatically.

I'm not going to come out and discourage you or other from adding the 
functionality to git, but I think there are more useful and practical ways to 
improve git.  (Line-by-line merging is generally "good enough", the worst 
enemy of "good" software.)

I think this was already discussed:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/60457/focus=60512

If you mean just looking at the code moves/copies between the trees (but
no other history), then a merge strategy which makes use of git blame's
code move/copy detection would be indeed nice, though nobody created it
so far.