> Yeah, good luck with that. With software like Photoshop, not every change is obvious or easily visible.

Well, there's the time-honored technique of "rapidly switch between windows that are zoomed to the same place." But, more rigorously, I mentioned a way to do this; there are tools that can do a diff of raster images--which is what you are making at the end of the day with Photoshop. Sure it can't tell you what blurring parameters someone changed, but you can see that the blur changed, then you can go look at the parameters.

> Or did thousands other things that are not immediately visible

The trickiness of that situation isn't unique to binary formats. It comes up with code too.

> Maybe you can manually merge the two files to some reasonably good approximation of the intended result, but you can't never be sure you didn't miss something important.

That's just as true with code as it is with other formats!

> because those formats were never explicitly designed to support merging.

Neither was text. We just ended up making some tools that were reasonably decent at it.

I've been there, I've done that. I've done the 3-way merge with Photoshop files, and resolved the conflicts with 2 different people working on an InDesign file, and broken down to running `diff` on hexdumps of PDF files. Resolving merges with things that don't have nice tools for it isn't fun.

But it's a /lie/ to claim that a conflict for binary formats is "game over, you're just going to steamroll someone's work, there is no path to merge resolution". It's not a fun path, but it's not game over. Which is all I was really trying to refute.

(aside: It's interesting to me that this chain of comments went from being upvoted last night to downvoted this morning.)

> Well, there's the time-honored technique of "rapidly switch between windows that are zoomed to the same place." But, more rigorously, I mentioned a way to do this; there are tools that can do a diff of raster images--which is what you are making at the end of the day with Photoshop. Sure it can't tell you what blurring parameters someone changed, but you can see that the blur changed, then you can go look at the parameters.

I guess this could work with simple cases and if you accept less than pixel-perfect standard; I can see how this will fail when several people are working on a single file for long (because not everything that is important is visible to visual diff, at least you'd end up overwriting whatever scaffolding the other guy set himself up for his work), but at this point I'd be questioning the workflow that requires two or more people to work simultaneously on a single asset.

> The trickiness of that situation isn't unique to binary formats. It comes up with code too.

> That's just as true with code as it is with other formats!

Not really - text files don't contain any more data than you can see when you open them in your editor. With text, you see everything. When you open a 3D model or a PSD file, or even a Word document, what you see is just a tip of an iceberg.

> But it's a /lie/ to claim that a conflict for binary formats is "game over, you're just going to steamroll someone's work, there is no path to merge resolution". It's not a fun path, but it's not game over. Which is all I was really trying to refute.

I can agree with that. It's not impossible to do such merges; worst case scenario, one will end up praying to a hex editor like you say you did. It can even be fun sometimes. I guess what 'vvanders was arguing about is practicality - you can do it if you're willing to invest the time, but it's much better to not have to do it at all.

> (aside: It's interesting to me that this chain of comments went from being upvoted last night to downvoted this morning.)

    HN moves in a mysterious way
    its voting to perform;
    A reader questions his comment's downvotes,
    And thus ensues shitstorm.

That is to say, sometimes it's so random and fluctuating that personally, I stopped caring. If I get downvotes I usually a) already know I deserve them for being an ass and/or factually incorrect, b) have someone tell me why I deserve them, or c) assume they're random fluctiations and not worth getting upset about. I think we're dealing with type c) now.