Merges without bases

I have a weird situation I want to support. I want to be able to merge a foreign-tree repeatedly.

What makes the foreign tree foreign is that it may not yet share any history with this branch.

What I tried to do was fetch foreign tree material and run octopus. Octopus understandably barfed when it could not find a merge base for the foreign tree.

What I think is newsworthy is that I figured out a sick way to get it done. I created an empty tree object and used it as the merge base for git-read-tree -m.

Could git-read-tree -m 3-args be made smart enough to treat a 0 as arg 1 as an implicit empty tree?

Once that is done, git octopus will be able to handle the no merge base case.

-- Darrin