Re: -s theirs use-case(s) Was: BUG: merge -s theirs is not in effect

Yaroslav Halchenko [off-list ref] writes:

and that is where the gotcha comes -- what if "my" changes were already
published?  then I would like to avoid the rebase, and would -s theirs
to choose "their" solution in favor of mine and be able to push so
others could still "fast-forward" to the new state.

So -- as to me it remains 'symmetric' ;)

I do not necessarily agree.  Once you decide that their history is
the mainline, you'd rather want to treat your line of development as
a side branch and make a merge in that direction, i.e. the first
parent of the resulting merge is a commit on their history and the
second parent is the last bad one of your history.  So you would end
up using "checkout their-history && merge -s ours your-history" to
keep the first-parenthood sensible.

And at that point, use of "-s ours" is no longer a workaround for
lack of "-s theirs".  It is a proper part of the desired semantics,
i.e. from the point of view of the surviving canonical history line,
you want to preserve what it did, nullifying what the other line of
history did.

So I still do not think the above scenario justifies "-s theirs".