Re: Can git be stopped from inserting conflict markers during a merge?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Mar 8, 2008, 20:51 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0803081242040.5896@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20080308T174918-559@post.gmane.org>

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, William Tanksley wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>
> I started using Mercurial a while ago, and I'd like to move up to git (for a
> number of reasons). The one thing that's stopping me is that (having recently
> escaped subversion and cvs) I'm now used to NOT having to worry about conflict
> markers being shoved into files. To put it simply, I really like how Mercurial
> does that one thing.

Can you describe what "that one thing" is?

> So, given the git is probably the ultimate in configurability, what do I need to
> do to make it not insert merge markers?

Do you want to just have both (with the base version, all three?) versions of the file in your directory?

That's actually conceptually what you have with git, even though what git does is to keep the different untouched versions in the index. So with git, you actually have *four* different versions of a file when you have a conflict:

 - the working tree one (which has the conflict markers, because that's 
   traditional)
 - and index stages 1 (base) 2 (ours) and 3 (theirs)

which is why when you do

	git diff

on an unmerged file, you actually get something much more powerful than just the conflict entries - you get a git multi-version diff. It's *really* convenient when you get used to it, but I you actually seem to be wanting something much simpler.

			Linus