Re: merging .gitignore

On Tuesday 2007 October 02, martin f krafft wrote:

Well, with gitignore I am ready to say that merges should be
resolved in an additive way. Remember that I am talking about an
intergration branch, and if feature branches A and B used to ignore
.o files, and now B suddenly does not ignore them anymore, the only

Okay; *.o was obviously not a good example.  A more detailed one: how about a 
change like this to a makefile (excuse bastardised diff format)

diff Makefile
-include depends.make
+include depends.mak

diff .gitignore
-depends.make
+depends.mak

  cat $gitignore_files | sort -u

Now, say there is another branch that makes exactly this change but 
chooses "depends.inc" as the filename.  Your "additive only" merge 
of .gitignore will not flag the conflict and will leave a .gitignore with

depends.mak
depends.inc

The makefile conflict will have been resolved one way or the other but the 
gitignore conflict will not.  While it's not a serious fault it is wrong, and 
no one was signalled that it was wrong.

I am still having difficult seeing why you want to hide conflicts 
in .gitignore.  It's just as possible to get and resolve conflicts in 
gitignore as in any other file.


Andy
-- 
Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIET
andyparkins@gmail.com