Re: [PATCH 1/9] Fix git patch header processing in git-apply.

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Aug 30, 2005, 01:24 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0508291821010.3243@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vacj06xi6.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Mon, 29 Aug 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> I, however, am not 100% convinced --ignore-applied is too
> dangerous to be useful in any conceivable use cases, at least
> not yet.  For example, you might be cherry-picking a change from
> a foreign branch with 'git-diff-tree -p other~45 | git apply',
> where the current branch may have already aquired part of the
> changes that foreign branch contains since 45 generations ago.

.. and that's why we use a three-way merge, and not diffs, to merge two branches.

--ignore-applied really is a pretty dangerous thing. I can see that it might do the right thing in many cases, but definitely not in a scripted environment, much less in an "import".

By definition, importing stuff must apply, since it clearly applied in whatever original source control tool you are importing from. So if an importer needs --ignore-applied, it is fundamentally doing something wrong.

And I just realized what "SourcePuller" is. Gaah. Trust me, that export is bad, and the original source control tool did everything very well indeed.

			Linus