The canonical example of a merge that is impossible via Git's `recursive` is a base of "AB" (where each character appears on a single line but I've omitted the

The canonical example of a merge that is impossible via Git's `recursive` is a base of "AB" (where each character appears on a single line but I've omitted the newlines for brevity), branch 1 is one commit containing "AXB", and branch 2 which is a commit "GAB" followed by another commit "ABGAB". Then the recursive merge of the two branches into each other cannot tell which AB pair in branch 2 the X from branch 1 should be inserted into, because it never sees the first commit of branch 2 which tells you that the "original" AB is the one after the G. `recursive` cannot distinguish between "AXBGAB" and "ABGAXB" as possibilities. A merge algorithm which looks at every commit can know that "ABGAXB" is more faithful to the actual sequence of events, because it knows which AB pair the X was inserted into on branch 1. (Another plausibly correct answer of course would be "AXBGAXB", but again `recursive` doesn't know enough to guess this answer.)