Re: merging .gitignore

From: Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 3, 2007, 08:23 UTC
Message-ID: <200710030923.22767.andyparkins@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20071002195148.GA14171@lapse.madduck.net>

On Tuesday 2007 October 02, martin f krafft wrote:

> Well, with gitignore I am ready to say that merges should be
> resolved in an additive way. Remember that I am talking about an
> intergration branch, and if feature branches A and B used to ignore
> .o files, and now B suddenly does not ignore them anymore, the only

Okay; *.o was obviously not a good example. A more detailed one: how about a change like this to a makefile (excuse bastardised diff format)

diff Makefile -include depends.make +include depends.mak

diff .gitignore -depends.make +depends.mak

>   cat $gitignore_files | sort -u

Now, say there is another branch that makes exactly this change but chooses "depends.inc" as the filename. Your "additive only" merge of .gitignore will not flag the conflict and will leave a .gitignore with

depends.mak depends.inc

The makefile conflict will have been resolved one way or the other but the gitignore conflict will not. While it's not a serious fault it is wrong, and no one was signalled that it was wrong.

I am still having difficult seeing why you want to hide conflicts in .gitignore. It's just as possible to get and resolve conflicts in gitignore as in any other file.

Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIET
andyparkins@gmail.com