Re: Question about pre-merge and git merge octopus strategy

>
> On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 10:24 AM Christian Couder
> <christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 10:15 AM ZheNing Hu <adlternative@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I am thinking about if git can "pre-merge" multiple branches, which
> > > can check if merge
> > > will have conflict, but not to merge them actually, like a option `--intend`.
> > >
> > > I find "git merge-tree" can output merge result in stdout, which meets
> > > my needs, but it can only
> > > support two branches' merge.
> >
> > Elijah (added in Cc) has been working on "git merge-tree" improvements
> > based on the new "ort" merge he developed. It supports merging 2
> > branches, but maybe there are ways to make it support more than 2.
>
> The primary issue with in-core octopus merges is that there are lots
> of questions about how to handle conflicts; possibly even more so than
> git merge-tree --write-tree brings up, and that took us months of
> discussion.  In particular, with octopii, do iterate merging one
> branch in at a time and stop with any conflicts (thus potentially
> stopping N-1 times when merging N branches), do you attempt to just
> run all N-1 merges and have conflicts that can't readily be expressed
> in the index (especially for non-textual multi-way conflicts, but even
> nested conflict markers for text files could be painful), do you
> attempt to handle the multi-way textual conflicts a new way with code
> replacing xdiff/ in order to avoid nested conflicts?  I wasn't sure
> what to do, so never implemented that in "ort".
>

> Of course, people could roll their own by just serially merging pairs
> of commits, and then rewriting the history to replace the string of
> merges with an octopus.  Or perhaps just use "git merge --no-commit"
> serially, though that only works if the branches touch disjoint files
> (otherwise one of the merges will complain you have changes that could
> be overwritten by the next merge).  And yes, if you don't want to mess
> with the working tree/index, you could serially use the "git
> merge-tree --write-tree" once I finish it, but it's not ready yet.
> (Sorry about that; I've got a bunch of nearly complete changes from a
> while ago but just didn't have much Git time.  I'll try to get to it
> soon.)
>

> However, I think Junio said that octopus merge only handles trivial
> cases anyway, in which case an iterated "git merge --write-tree" would
> actually be a sufficient solution here and we could sidestep the more
> convoluted cases.  But, sadly for ZheNing, that option doesn't exist
> yet -- It's still under development.
>
> > > So I find git merge with more than two branches can use octopus strategy.
> > > What about git merge --no-commit? Which will not commit automatically,
> > > so we can check if they have
> > > confilct, and abort merge.
> >
> > Yeah, I think that's what you want.
> >
> > > I think it's not useful for git merge-octopus, because if we meet a
> > > merge conflict, we can't find
> > > MERGE_HEAD at all! How can we abort this conflict merge?
>
> MERGE_HEAD doesn't have anything to do with aborting the conflict
> resolution step.  When you need to abort, the thing you want to go
> back to is HEAD (which represents the commit you had checked out and
> were merging the other stuff into), not MERGE_HEAD (which represents
> the branch or branches you were merging into HEAD).
>

> > I don't know octopus merges much, but I think you should be able to
> > abort using "git reset" (maybe with "--hard").  If the merge was
> > performed using --no-commit or if there was a conflict, then I think
> > it should be expected that there is no MERGE_HEAD as no commit would
> > be created so MERGE_HEAD would have nothing to point to.
>
> MERGE_HEAD isn't something created during a merge, it's something that
> existed before it -- namely, the tip of the other branch we are
> merging.  For an octopus merge, you'd thus expect it to have N commits
> rather than just 1.
>
> AUTO_MERGE, new to ort, is something that is created during a merge
> and when the merge interrupts due to conflicts to ask the user to
> resolve the conflicts, AUTO_MERGE represents the tree checked out in
> the working copy (thus it is a tree that likely has files with
> conflict markers in them).