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Does Mercurial improve file merging with small change sets?

Let's say I have a development branch for some function called "myDevelopmentBranch", and another branch "myOtherBranch" contains quite a few changes, some of which will conflict with material from "myDevelopmentBranch". Will the (potentially) result of merging from "myDevelopmentBranch" to "myOtherBranch" differ if I act more often than if I do less often (for example, several times a day versus once or twice a week)? I'm curious about this, as I would prefer Mercurial (or any other VCS) to track changes in small chunks, so I’d better deal with how to combine them.

Attention! I know many reasons why you need to do this often; this is just a technical question that I have been thinking about.

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Merging resolves the differences between the modified files, since they are at the tip of both branches (provided that you merge the hints). So if you ...

  • 1 change set A1 on branch A that changes 500 lines, parent change set Z
  • 1 set of changes B1 on branch B, which changes 500 lines, parent set of changes Z

... you will have the same merge experience compared to 50 sets of changes in each branch that change 10 lines each to create the same final state of the files in each branch, as described above.

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