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

On Wed, 27 Sep 2017, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

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.

quoted

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".

ok, when you describe it like this (in my case I rarely cared about the
side of the merge), then indeed I might better do the entire dance with
git reset --hard theirstate; git merge -s ours HEAD@{1}
and live happily with the left side being the one always correct and
hide "my" mistakes ;)  will keep it in mind

-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Center for Open Neuroscience     http://centerforopenneuroscience.org
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