The labels we put in conflict markers are formatted so the part before
the ':' (typically says things like "local") is padded so the ':' is
aligned among the labels. That means that if you specify a long label
for "base" but the conflict marker style is "merge" (i.e. 2-way), the
other two will have unwanted padding. We often don't specify a label
for the base, so we don't notice the problem (and it may very well be
that it didn't exist before my D11972).
I think the best fix is to pass the labels along with the context
objects, so the low-level code that switches on the marker style to
use (i.e. simplemerge) can do the formatting. This patch starts
doing that by passing a fully-formatted label to simplemerge. A
coming patch will move the formatting to simplemerge.
This is slightly out of date now