Merge priority

I'm not sure this is even a sensible question....

I have a whole bunch of customer branches with all manner of local tweaks and modifications. I also have a stable branch with all my security patches and bug fixes. They do share common ancestry.

I now want to update all my customer branches with the latest fixes and patches. Naively, I would just check out each branch and merge the stable branch - job done. However, is it sensible to ask if there is a way to say that the stable branch is more important if there are conflicts. Or should I be using rebase instead (which I still don't really understand). I'm trying to reduce my workload as there are loads of branches to do.

Cheers :-)

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 13:44, Howard Miller <howard@e-learndesign.co.uk> wrote:

No, all branches are equal. Besides, are you sure it is safe to just take your stable version of the code in a conflict? Maybe the stable code uses something a customer branch renamed or removed?

You can take a look at rerere, though. It should help resolving repeating conflicts by recording a resolution of your choice.

Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com> writes:

Use of rerere often helps but there is a caveat.

Even if two branches (e.g. 'master' and 'maint') currently has the same tree, the desired outcome of merging the same commit into them could be different depending on the purpose of these branches. You may want to resolve a conflicted merge into 'maint' more conservatively than the way you would resolve the exact same merge into 'master'.

Imagine a case where 'master' branch added a better helper functions in other files, but they are not in 'maint' yet, and the conflicted part could be resolved better if you made it call these newer helper functions available only in 'master'.

Unfortunately the conflicts would look exactly the same to rerere, so if you record the result of the merge to 'master', replaying that resolution while merging the same commit to 'maint' would produce undesirable result.

As to "does the aggregated result make sense if you blindly add changes in 'stable' for only conflicted parts to an automerge result?", which was your other point, you may refer your readers to Avery's recent updates to resurrect -Xours option to "git merge".

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Howard Miller <howard@e-learndesign.co.uk> wrote:

Yep, that's what I'd do.

Not really. The git approach is to assume that... when there is a conflict, you must look into it. A human needs to take a decision...

No, rebase will increase the load and complexity.

cheers,

m