Git 2.36.0 released

I don't find the old style clear at all. I usually just ignore such messes and look at the new code as-is to try and figure out if it makes sense. If needed, I look at each diff individually to make sure its change got in the resulting resolution.

The new one is fine because I see 3-way diffs all the time. I can see that line X came from side A and line Y came from side B very easily. If there's a line which is different from any change, it shows up as a modified line instead of a series of line removals.

I find the traditional one easy to understand backwards. It looks to me like it's saying which changes each side contributed to the resulting commit, but it's actually saying which changes each side didn't already contain. In the example, the wrong interpretation is equivalent to the right one (if you don't pay attention to the order of columns and order of parents), but then the output is very surprising if the merge discarded some changes from one side or the other or introduced entirely new code in order to make the features work together.

I think the new one can only be understood correctly or not at all, and is much more clearly saying "this is how the conflict was resolved"; on the other hand, conflict resolution is a difficult skill, and this relies on it in order to make sense of the output.

I think there might be a way to present it as a diff from the common answer to the merge result, marked with attribution as to the side it came through (or marked that it was new in the merge commit).

Part of the confusion may be the usage of the diff3 output format in the example, which is non-default and not everyone is used to. (If you don't have diff3 configured, remerge-diff won't use it in the output it shows.)

Also, looking at remerge-diff output for merges done by others tend to be harder to read than for merges you performed.

It can be understood this way: Basically, if you were to redo the merge of the two branches using 'git merge' now, and you run into conflicts, then git merge stop and point out that you need to resolve some issues. Resolving the conflicts will involve removing conflict markers, choosing which lines to keep, and possibly modifying some of those lines (and maybe even making other modification outside of the "conflict region"). The remerge-diff output is simply the changes from where 'git merge' would have stopped and told you to resolve things, and what got recorded in the commit. If it was a clean merge (and you didn't amend the merge commit), then the remerge-diff output will be empty.

I can't tell what you're responding to in the Git 2.36 release notes. I re-read them now and can't find anything related to diffs of diffs, but perhaps I missed it. Could you point it out to me?