alt Hacker Newswhat do you actually gain over enforced formatting?
first you should not be composing releases at the end from conflicting branches, you should be integrating branches and testing each one in sequence and then cutting releases. if there are changes to the base for a given branch, that means that branch has to be updated and re-tested. simple as that. storing changes as normalized trees rather than normalized text doesn't really buy you anything except for maybe slightly smarter automatic merge conflict resolution but even then it needs to be analyzed and tested.
Diffs are fragile, and while I agree with that process in a world where humans do all the work and you aren't cutting a dozen different releases, I think that's a world we're rapidly moving away from.