Re: [PATCH 4/5] Documentation: document AUTO_MERGE

From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 15, 2023, 23:31 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPp-BGtewvrsO_9hf5A4iqpTBW7VL1p8skwMGA+tFju1emQ4w@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <5cd89e46-f099-24bb-ebe4-fabdd6f94aef@gmail.com>

On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 8:36 AM Philippe Blain <levraiphilippeblain@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hi Elijah,
>

<snip>

Show 7 quoted lines

> > (By contrast, the closely related --remerge-diff option to `git log`
> > or `git show` does help see the resolution of *both* the textual and
> > non-textual conflicts, but of course one can't use that option on the
> > current merge until after first commiting the existing changes.)
>
> That's true. And, remerge-diff only helps when actually looking at two-way
> merge commit, not with conflicts hit during a rebase, cherry-pick or revert.

Good point. I have a small patchset to create an option allowing folks to see how conflicts were resolved in reverts, and in cherry-picks made with the -x option. I made it over two years ago, but never ended up deciding whether to submit it or not. At some point I put it up on gitgitgadget, at https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/1151.

Points against it are that it doesn't work for rebases (because we don't know which commits they were taken from) or for many cherry-picks. Given the lower utility, and the fact that it involves commit message scraping (looking for "reverts commit <X>" and "(cherry-picked from <X>)"), I never ended up pushing for it.

> A semi-related trick I use to check conflict resolution during a rebase (after
> resolving the conflicts but before 'git rebase --continue') is to manually
> construct a commit from the index and use 'git range-diff' to compare it
> to REBASE_HEAD.

Heh, I have a semi-related trick as well.  During rebases, when I want
to compare overall diffs for the current commit against what it was
picked from, I tend to use:
   mydiff <(git log -1 -p REBASE_HEAD) <(git diff HEAD)
where `mydiff` is a specialized wrapper around `git diff --no-index`
that actually reads the contents of /dev/fd/<value> instead of
treating it as a symlink.  (Though if I don't have that script handy,
I just plug in `diff -u` for `mydiff`).