Re: Merge format documented?

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de> writes:

> On Monday, 23 March 2009 4:50:24 Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de> writes:
>> > is the format that git normally uses for indicating merge conflicts in
>> > files (the <<< === >>> markers) documented somewhere?  How exactly does
>> > it differ from the diff3 format (<<< ||| === >>>)?  Diff3's -m mode seems
>> > to come close to what git does, except that git doesn't produce the |||
>> > section:
>>
>> It is an imitation of output from "merge" program of RCS suite Paul you
>> know maintains ;-)
>
> So it's the same format except that diff3's ||| section isn't shown. I was 
> wondering if there are any additional tricks.

No additional tricks.

As far as I can remember, the format was not really chosen, but simply
fell out as a natural consequence of using "merge" rather than "diff3" as
a merge backend (we originally used to invoke "merge" from RCS suite
instead of performing file-level merges ourselves), but we could say we
chose "merge" over "diff3 -m" because the output format should be more
familiar than the diff3-m format with |||, especially to anybody who came
from subversion or CVS background.