Re: more merge strategies : feature request

On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 09:38:07PM -0500, Caleb Cushing wrote:

conflict: when auto-merging isn't merging the way you want it too, but
you still want to see the diffs and handle them by hand. no commit
won't do this, it just doesn't commit. I've had 2 situations now where
git's fast-forward has overwritten changes in a branch I didn't want
it to, it would have been better if I could handle them by hand
without having to have 1 terminal open to the diff and the other open
to the editor to fix it. and yes git was right by it's perspective,
but the code it created was wrong by what I wanted and needed. I'm not
really sure what more of a use case is needed for this.

It's not clear to me exactly what you want. Let's say I have a file
'foo' with changes from my merged branches in two different spots.
For example:

 merge base     branch A      branch B
    1              2             1
    2              3             2
    3              4             3
    4              5             4
    5

Did you want conflict markers in the resulting file? If so, what should
the conflict markers look like, since there isn't actually a conflict?

Alternatively, you could have git leave the file in an unmerged state,
and then access the base, ours, and theirs version from the index (or
even use git mergetool). Then you would get your desired versions into
the merging tool of your choice.

Of course, you could also just use a custom merge driver to accomplish
the same thing:

  git config merge.xxdiff.driver 'xxdiff %A %O %B'
  echo '* merge=xxdiff' >.gitattributes
  git merge your-branch

and of course you can specify whatever subset of files you want to
actually do this for instead of '*'.

-Peff