Re: [PATCH 3/3] diff: correct warning message when renameLimit exceeded

On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 10:17 PM Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Elijah Newren [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Am I mixing up negatives/positives (as I'm prone to do), or would it
be more correct to say the new algorithm risks suboptimal positives
rather than that it risks false negatives?

I'm prone to mixing them up, too, but I think they are the sides of
the same coin.  Imagine there is a path X on the source side, and
two paths Y and Z on the destination side.  With exhaustive match,
Z might be a better match (content-wise) to X than Y is to X.

For the path X on the source that is matched with a suboptimal
counterpart Y on the destination side, we may call the situation a
false-positive because with a more exhaustive search we might have
been able to find Z that is a better match.  For the path Z on the
destination side that was culled too early with heuristics and
failed to be matched with the source path X that got matched with a
suboptimal destination path Y, it is a loss for Z---it wasn't chosen
when it should have been (i.e. a false negative, as Z saw no
counterparts).

In any case, during the word search for "inexact", "more precise",
"more expensive", I do not think negatives and positives will play a
big role anyway, so...

Indeed, I've gotten us off on a bit of a tangent, but thanks for
taking the time to answer my questions.  :-)