Three-Way Merge Guide: How Git Combines Diverged Branches
Learn how three-way merges work in Git. Understand base, ours, and theirs revisions, auto-merge heuristics, and when recursive merges fail.
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Tags: developer-tools, diff, merge
Three-Way Merge Guide: How Git Combines Diverged Branches When two people edit the same file in different ways, how does Git decide what the result should look like? The answer is a three-way merge — an algorithm that's been at the core of version control since the 1980s. Understanding how it works explains both why Git can automatically merge most changes and why it sometimes produces conflicts that require human judgment. It also explains the behavior of , rebase, and cherry-pick in ways that aren't obvious from the documentation alone. The Three-Way Merge Algorithm For each line in the file, the algorithm considers the base, the left version (ours), and the right version (theirs): | Base | Ours | Theirs | Result | |------|------|--------|--------| | X | X | X | X (no change) | | X | Y…
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