> In 2009, a surprising amount of the discourse was focused on the algorithms git used to automatically merge changes together. IIRC Torvalds himself was quite

> In 2009, a surprising amount of the discourse was focused on the algorithms git used to automatically merge changes together. IIRC Torvalds himself was quite pessimistic about what could be achieved with automatic merging. (And in this he was correct.) He said that Git had rejected the idea that a version-control system could, or should attempt to, "solve the merging problem" by finding a sufficiently-smart algorithm which would do the right things automatically. > Offline editing is a UI/UX problem True. There are two deeper root causes here: 1) computing's commitment to cargo-culting old solutions and, relatedly, 2) its devotion to the belief "in general 5-lb sacks are nicer to deal with than 10-lb sacks: therefore I should fit my 10 lbs of POL into one 5-lb sack". The default vision of "text editor" is "Mosaic textarea", "MacWrite" or something in between, so the quest is usually to bolt merging onto something like that with the minimum possible change. Make it a menu item, or a little dialog box with a few options. If there is some kind of GUI support for merging hidden deep in the menus it's a programmer-UI diff-merger horror that barely does the minimum, or a strikethrough-based view which feels treacherous like navigating a ship through a fog. But in fact in text editing with offline collaboration merging, partly-manual merging at that, is a central part of the process and it needs to be central to the design of the editor. Unfortunately MacWrite is a local maximum which isn't easy to get far away from.