Re: [PATCH v4 0/2] Fix scissors bug during merge conflict

Denton Liu [off-list ref] writes:

I just realised that there is a slight problem with the proposed change.
When we do a merge and there are no merge conflicts, at the end of the
merge, we get dropped into an editor with this text:

	Merge branch 'master' into new

	# Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary,
	# especially if it merges an updated upstream into a topic branch.
	#
	# Lines starting with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts
	# the commit.

Note that in git-merge, the cleanup only removes commented lines and
this cannot be configured to be scissors or whatever else. I think that
the fact that it's not configurable isn't a problem; most hardcore
commit message editing happens in git-commit anyway.

OK.

However, since we taught git-merge the --cleanup option, this might be
misleading for the end-user since they would expect the MERGE_MSG to be
cleaned up as specified.

I see two resolutions for this. We can either rename --cleanup more
precisely so users won't be confused (perhaps something like
--merge-conflict-scissors but a lot more snappy) or we can actually make
git-merge respect the cleanup option and post-process the message
according to the specified cleanup rule.

The former certainly would be simpler to implement, but feels more
like an excuse for not doing the right thing to me, when I put
myself in shoes of users who use 'scissors' clean-up option in
commit.  I dunno.