Re: fuzzy patch application

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

I dunno. I always use it, but I'm not sure if there are any downsides,
aside from a little extra processing time. It does have some
incompatibilities with other options. And I think it kicks in rename
detection (but I might be mis-remembering another feature). That could
be surprising, I guess.

The original dates all the way back to 47f0b6d5d (Fall back to three-way
merge when applying a patch., 2005-10-06), but I don't see any rationale
for not making it the default. Junio probably could give a better
answer.

Nothing deep.  Just being cautious by not to enable extra frills by
default, making it strictly o-p-t i-n.  As that was a strict fall
back (i.e. there was no "if we are going to fall back, we need to
spend extra cycles to do this extra preparation before we attempt
the regular application"), extra-processing cost was not a concern,
at least back I wrote it the first time.  I do not offhand know if
that still holds in the current one that was rewritten in C.

Making "am -3" default may also scare users who are not exactly
comfortable with reading "git diff" output during a conflicted merge
and resolving a conflict, but other than that there shouldn't be any
downside.