Trouble with file specific merge strategies

Hi git devs,

I have a repo with two branches where some files are absent in one of the branches. Say the two branches are <allfiles> and <somefiles>. Until now I was using

$ git merge -s ours <allfiles> # with <somefiles> checked out

to merge commits which touches the absent files. But this clutters up history and is very inconvenient to do sometimes. So when I came across the possibility of using .gitattributes for file specific merge strategies, I tried the following:

pattern merge=ours

However I get the following conflict message:

CONFLICT (rename/delete): org-mode-config.el deleted in HEAD and renamed in 74288bb. Version 74288bb of org-mode-config.el left in tree.

This file was deleted from <somefiles> in the past[1] and was renamed in <allfiles> since the last merge. I was expecting this file to be ignored (or in other words, merged with ours) since the .gitattributes file has entries like these:

org-mode-config.el merge=ours # new name in allfiles branch lisp/org-mode-settings.el merge=ours # old name deleted in somefiles

I also see other new files in <allfiles> which are mentioned in .gitattributes being merged in <somefiles>.

$ git status -sb ## somefiles M abbrev_defs A cpp-config.el A email-config.el # <-- this should be ignored A gui-config.el # <-- this should be ignored UU init.el A keybindings.el M lisp/skeletons.el D lisp/text-mode-like-settings.el UA org-mode-config.el # <-- this should be ignored A text-mode-config.el

What am I doing wrong here? My git version is 1.7.7.6.

Thanks in advance,

Footnotes:

[1] There has been several successful merges since then.