> I'm just a little uncomfortable with a feature that uses diffs for purposes other than display for humans, since they don't seem to be consistently defined.

> I'm just a little uncomfortable with a feature that uses diffs for purposes other than display for humans, since they don't seem to be consistently defined. Sure, I see your point as it applies to cherry-picks/rebasing. Yes, there's no formal guarantee it will do as you expect. The user should always check it manually. Occasionally it doesn't do what you want. I'm of the opinion git cherry-pick should default to behaving like git cherry-pick --no-commit for that reason. edit: > they don't always produce the most sensible result I don't know how much work has been done on language-aware diff/merge algorithms, but I can't see an obvious reason for it to be a dead-end.