On the Nature of Merge Conflicts

One way to help solve merge conflicts is incremental merge/rebase - bisect the merge to find which commit causes the conflict, then let the programmer solve that, then repeat again. I'm using git-imerge for this, but there is also mergify and a faster fork of it called git-mergify-rebase.

https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge https://github.com/brooksdavis/mergify https://github.com/CTSRD-CHERI/git-mergify-rebase

> This was, to us, an unexpected result. Given all the commentary and folklore surrounding the merge problem and how difficult it is said to be to resolve merge conflicts…we had expected new code (NC) to be the most common choice.

Is this really particularly surprising? I've almost never written new code to solve a merge conflict. Merge conflicts are hard to resolve because they require making complex decisions, not because they require writing code.

I like the focus on tools to assist the human, rather than automating merge conflicts. Even if you come up with a new clever algo that reduces merge conflicts by x% from where we are now, how do you decide that these two pieces of now non-conflicting don't interact with eachother to produce undersirable behaviour? Unless you solve that pretty well, I much prefer the pattern of keeping a human brain in the loop.