The xor has the effect of flipping the "1" bit, so that "2 ^ 1" becomes
"3" and "3 ^ 1" becomes "2", which correspond to the "ours" and "theirs"
stages respectively.
Unfortunately, clang-10 and up issue a warning for this code:
merge-recursive.c:1759:40: error: result of '2 ^ 1' is 3; did you mean '1 << 1' (2)? [-Werror,-Wxor-used-as-pow]
add = &ci->ren1->dst_entry->stages[2 ^ 1];
~~^~~
1 << 1
merge-recursive.c:1759:40: note: replace expression with '0x2 ^ 1' to silence this warning
We could silence it by using 0x2, as the compiler mentions. Or by just
using the constants "2" and "3" directly. But after digging into it, I
do think this bit-flip is telling us something. If we just wrote:
add = &ci->ren2->dst_entry->stages[2];
for the second one, you might think that "ren2" and "2" correspond. But
they don't. The logic is: ren2 is theirs, which is stage 3, but we
are interested in the opposite side's stage, so flip it to 2.
So let's keep the bit-flipping, but let's also put it behind a named
function, which will make its purpose a bit clearer. This also has the
side effect of suppressing the warning (and an optimizing compiler
should be able to easily turn it into a constant as before).
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>