Re: [PATCH] Re: Clarify documentation on the "ours" merge strategy.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2009, 09:10 UTC
Message-ID: <7vk4xsqhkv.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20091114111259.6117@nanako3.lavabit.com>

Nanako Shiraishi <nanako3@lavabit.com> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> Quoting Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se>
>
>> The web tree checkout script uses rebase to avoid introducing merge
>> commits every time the blog comment is updated, as it in 99 % of cases
>> is unrelated to any other changes found in the central repo.
>>
>> In the few cases where the blog comment update from the web tree
>> conflicts with a change in the central repo, I want the "git pull
>> --rebase" call to overwrite any changes in the central repo with my
>> changes in the web tree (meaning that I would later have to manually
>> re-delete the spam comments, but I can live with that).
>
> That sounds like "-Xours" merge option that was discussed some time 
> ago. See
>
>     http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/76650/focus=89021
>
> I remember that Junio and Petr were against it because it would 
> encourage a bad workflow. Dscho was against the syntax used to 
> pass the options also.

Yeah, Björn seems to speculate the same.

Even though I still think -Xours/-Xtheirs are nonsense options in the context of source code management, I suspect that they might be exactly what Peter needs in this situation.

As long as the changes made on the "web tree" side only consist of user-generated blog contents and never touch framework code that is controlled by his "central repo" side (and that condition should hold true; otherwise Peter's web site is seriously broken from the security point of view and no SCM can fix that), running a merge with the fabled -Xours option in the "web tree" to slurp in the changes made on the "central repo" side does not sound like an unreasonable thing to do.