So there’s a balance: perhaps your tool works very well for very difficult merge situations? For scenarios like the one I tested, where there are some complex but not unmanageable merge situations, your tool made me do work which most of the other tools I evaluated didn’t make me do. A classic trade-off.

Thanks for your input on the subject.

There are still 3-way merge tools out there that don’t detect lines inserted at the same point in the code as a conflict. One of these merge tools will detect fewer conflicts. But, it would be a mistake to think of them as “smarter” because the user has fewer conflicts to resolve.

Guiffy’s 3-way merge applies a proprietary algorithm which is not based on unique anchor file compare algorithms used by other merge tools. The sureMerge algorithm avoids the worse case scenarios which can happen when the set of unique anchors are not the same for all 3-way compares. In such cases even the authors of those algorithms admit reconciling the compare results for the auto-merge is problematic. Thats another way of saying — its impossible to get it right all the time.

Guiffy’s SureMerge 3-way algorithm treats changes which are close to each other but not acutally overlapping as Attentions (conflicts). Yes, this can result in more Attentions than conflicts. But, by reviewing these changes, the merge user will be more confident of their merge result.

The White Paper on our web site includes simple test case file sets for evaluating 3-way merge tools. If you use those test files with other merge tools (such as those menthioned in your post), you will see how Guiffy SureMerge produces more trustworthy merge results.

We have many other much more complicated “ugly merge” cases which we’ve collected over the years from users of other merge tool failures which SureMerge processes properly.

Please, if you have any 3-way merge cases which you’d like to discuss further — let me know.