Re: theirs/ours was Re: [PATCH 6/6] Add a new test for using a custom merge strategy

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jul 29, 2008, 11:05 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0807291301060.4631@eeepc-johanness>
In-Reply-To: <20080729043839.GC26997@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Hi,

On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Jeff King wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 01:27:44AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> > > So the logical sequence was:
> > > 
> > >   git checkout production
> > >   git merge -s theirs master
> > 
> > To me, this suggests that they were too married to 'production' being 
> > the "dominant" branch.
> 
> Perhaps. But I see this as an operation on the production branch: "pull
> in master's changes, forgetting ours".

First of all, I cannot say how wrong it is to forget any changes in a production branch without proper explanation. I.e. without a commit message explaining _why_ the change was wrong to begin with.

It is messy at best, and I am happy that Git does not make that easy.

> In your workflow (git checkout master && git merge -s ours production && 
> git push origin master:production) we perform an operation on master, 
> which doesn't seem as intuitive to me.

But why?  Isn't the _content_ of "master" what we want?

> Not to mention that we might not _control_ master.

This is Git.  We control all local branches.

Show 13 quoted lines

> What about (and I think Sverre mentioned something like this 
> previously):
> 
>  I forked the kernel and made some changes. Some of my changes got
>  applied upstream. The others are now obsolete. Now I want to bring
>  myself in sync with Linus, but I want to keep my history (either
>  because the history is interesting to me, or because others are basing
>  their work on it).
> 
> Then your workflow, while still possible within the local repository, 
> means you are munging the "linus" branch, which seems wrong. That branch 
> is probably even just a tracking branch, which you would not want to 
> build on, anyway.

No, this workflow almost _dictates_ a plain "pull" into your local branch. The fact that a few commits were applied to upstream usually only means that your merge succeeds trivially, since the merged branches contain the _same_ changes.

Ciao, Dscho