Re: Merging limitations after directory renames -- interesting test repo

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 5:19 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Right, this is looking better! Applied Linus and Jeff's patches, and things are much more civilized.

Now, I still have a ton of cases where the 2 branches renamed it just slightly different. In those cases, what I want to do is have a merge helper script that does...

 git merge-helper --prefer-path foo/orig/README foo/preferred/README
foo/other/README

if git could keep the rename trios that it recognizes during the merge operation in a "merge notes" file, we could just name

 git merge-helper --prefer-path foo/preferred/README

and have it infer the "non-preferred" paths.

The result of the operation should be the same as if git had magically known what I wanted to do during merge: git attempts a git-smart diff3 type merge, and stores the results accordingly in the index.

Even for a large messy merge like this, it means I can say

 git merge
 git merge-helper --prefer-path src/templates/themes/default/* other/dir/foo/*

and that will clear out 99% of the stupid work with minimal fuss; leaving the interesting merge work to be cleared up by hand.

I suspect that teaching git merge to accept about 'preferred paths', and perhaps "cache/learn" about them, is also desirable. Harder though.

Thoughts?

cheers,

m