Re: files are disappearing in git

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, Ryan Anderson wrote:

Nope, I don't think that should matter. Also, that doesn't seem to match what Nico & co are doing, but that's hard to tell..

A merge result should be totally independent of the index file(s) involved.

A dirty index file can cause a merge to _fail_, in that git may refuse to do the merge at all because of the index not matching the original branch, but a successful automated merge should never have any dependencies on what happens to be in the index at the time the merge was done.

So you can think of a merge as being totally specified by the trees involved, unless we have some bug, of course. I can't think of any.

Now, what _can_ happen (I think) is that if a merge is a failure (and there, a dirty index can certainly be the _cause_ of that failure), then when you fix it up and commit, there's some mix-up at _that_ stage.

For example, let's say that you had a dirty tree or something, and then the merge failed, and you didn't see anything wrong, so you just end up doing a "git commit". At _that_ point, what you had in the index matters very much, of course, since the index is what will be committed.

Hmm.. Can you elaborate?

(Side note: all my commentary is purely about the "raw git" interfaces. I don't know what cogito may do on top of it).

		Linus