Re: [PATCH] Documentation: warn against merging in a dirty tree

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 15, 2008, 23:53 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b130809151653w27d7876fp35e0967d597ae2a9@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vtzch7z7u.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> writes:
>
>> Merging in a dirty tree is usually a bad idea because you need to
>> reset --hard to abort; but the docs didn't say anything about it.
>
> Strictly speaking, you do not have to worry about anything if (1) all of
> your work tree changes are easily reproducible (Linus's keeping a new
> EXTRAVERSION in his Makefile, never staged nor committed is an often cited
> example), or (2) you know beforehand that a merge with the other party
> will not touch the part you have local changes that you care about.
>
> In other words, you need to know what you are doing, and a warning with
> "usually it is a bad idea" would be an appropriate thing to do.

But how do you abort a *failed* merge in a situation like Linus's example? "git reset --hard HEAD" would destroy the unstaged Makefile change.

I would love to know the answer to this for my own work, and I guess it would be relevant to the documentation too.

Have fun,

Avery