Re: subtree merging fails

From: David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 7, 2017, 18:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20170207184437.c6uuuxcmhi434vbc@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJZjrdU3toam4tDwXBu1Q3UAZm-kML3CzMrsMoJ_2jsGJ3vWrQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Feb 07, 2017 at 08:59:06AM -0600, Samuel Lijin wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Have you tried using (without -s subtree) -X subtree=path/to/add/subtree/at?
> 
> From the man page:
> 
>           subtree[=<path>]
>                This option is a more advanced form of subtree
> strategy, where the strategy
>                makes a guess on how two trees must be shifted to match
> with each other when
>                merging. Instead, the specified path is prefixed (or
> stripped from the
>                beginning) to make the shape of two trees to match.

I'm not 100% certain, but it's highly likely that the subtree=<prefix> argument needs to include a trailing slash "/" in the prefix, otherwise files will be named e.g. "fooREADME" instead of "foo/README" when prefix=foo.

These days I would steer users towards the "git-subtree" command in contrib/ so that users don't need to deal with these details. It handles all of this stuff for you.

https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/subtree/git-subtree.txt

https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/subtree

Updating the progit book to also mention git-subtree, in addition to the low-level methods, would probably be a good user-centric change.

-- 
David