The merge API helps a program to reconcile two competing sets of improvements to some files (e.g., unregistered changes from the work tree versus changes involved in switching to a new branch), reporting conflicts if found. The library called through this API is responsible for a few things.
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determining which trees to merge (recursive ancestor consolidation);
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lining up corresponding files in the trees to be merged (rename detection, subtree shifting), reporting edge cases like add/add and rename/rename conflicts to the user;
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performing a three-way merge of corresponding files, taking path-specific merge drivers (specified in
.gitattributes) into account.
Data structures
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mmbuffer_t,mmfile_t
These store data usable for use by the xdiff backend, for writing and
for reading, respectively. See xdiff/xdiff.h for the definitions
and diff.c for examples.
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struct ll_merge_options
Check ll-merge.h for details.
Low-level (single file) merge
Check ll-merge.h for details.