Re: [PATCH] git init: activate rerere by default

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jul 6, 2007, 12:03 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0707061303260.4093@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <200707061112.l66BCb6w017186@mi1.bluebottle.com>

Hi,

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, しらいしななこ wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I am sorry, but I can't understand how [git rerere] works and how it is 
> useful, after reading the manual page of git-rerere three times.  Are 
> there "rerere tutorial for stupid newbies" document somewhere?  I 
> earlier created .git/rr-cache folder but I have not seen anything 
> interesting happened in my repository.

There is no tutorial. In fact, it should help your workflow seemlessly.

Suppose that you rebase a lot, on top of an upstream who has conflicting changes, and refuses (at least for a long time) to merge your work.

What you usually do is work out the conflicts over and over again, often identically. Basically for many conflicts (but not necessarily all!), you say: "Yes, I have seen that. My version is better."

When rerere is enabled, it records the conflicting hunks (i.e. the parts between <<<<<<< ... ======= ... >>>>>>>) together with how you resolved it, and next time it sees the same conflicting hunks, it automatically applies your resolution.

You should still inspect if it makes sense, and therefore the merge will still fail, even if all conflicts were automatically resolved.

Hth, Dscho