
66-way merge: “Christ, that's not an octopus, that's a Cthulhu merge” - jjuhl
https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/21/361
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shakna
> Yep, sorry, it's my fault that I overlooked Medusa there. I usually check
> with gitk, but at this time, I checked the results only via --no-merges
> option for concentrating on the real changes.

> Now I looked at it, and I was turned into sto..n...e...... Takashi [0]

[0] [https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/23/80](https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/23/80)

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Deathmax
Commit:
[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=2cde51fbd0f310c8a2c5f977e665c0ac3945b46d)

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amelius
I wasn't even aware that Git is capable of merging from more than N=2 parents
(technically a three-way merge) ...

Is this a relatively new feature? And what is the use-case for N>2?

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mehrdadn
It's been there for a long time AFAIK... not sure what the use case is though.
(I guess if they're all non-conflicting then it's chill?)

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amelius
Perhaps the use-case is "consensus". I.e., when you have a 66-way merge and 50
of those say "x=0;" and 16 of those say "x=1;", then it can pick the one with
the most consensus, i.e. "x=0;". Or something like that ...

EDIT: of course using a special flag, otherwise indeed it could lead to
problems.

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et2o
What is the likelihood that the commits making up the different versions would
be byte-for-byte identical, however?

~~~
amelius
They don't need to be identical. You could use the same kind of algorithms as
bioinformaticians use to merge multiple different DNA sequences (which can be
of different length).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_sequence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_sequence)

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Operyl
Related: [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2017/the-biggest-
and...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2017/the-biggest-and-weirdest-
commits-in-linux-kernel-git-history)

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vidarh
This just seems like a challenge for someone to come up with an even more
extreme one.

~~~
shakna
Apparently tipbot has merged a commit with 243 parents before. [0] Getting
much worse might require some truly pathological circumstances.

[0] [https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/23/611](https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/23/611)

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wickedOne
as discussed over here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17265151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17265151)

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okket
(2014)

