Poor status output during conflicted merge

Let's create a merge conflict and then partially resolve it:

git init bad-status cd bad-status/ echo 1 > file git add file git commit -a -m1 echo 2 > file git commit -a -m2 git checkout -b topic HEAD^ echo 3 > file git commit -a -m3 git merge master git checkout --ours file git add file

A 'git status' at this point gives the following output:

# On branch topic nothing to commit (working directory clean)

Which is wrong, since the merge still needs to be committed.

- Eric

Eric Raible <raible@gmail.com> writes:

It might be just a simple matter of ...

 wt-status.c |    2 ++
 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Junio C Hamano wrote:

I don't think it's that simple.  Consider the case of an integrator who
initially picks the wrong branch.  Wouldn't it seem that:
	git checkout --ours file
	git add file
	git status

should result in the same output as:
	git checkout --theirs file
	git add file
	git status
	# oops
	git checkout --ours file
	git add file
	git status

I can accept an answer is "no". After all, 'git add' says that you are happy. But it makes me wonder whether the empty "if (s->in_merge)" clause in wt_status_print_cached_header() wouldn't be the right place to handle this case.

Aside from that, wouldn't the message "merge result will be the same as HEAD commit" be incorrect if that there are other files which were already merged successfully?

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:00 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

I suppose that's better than nothing, but I can't help but think that the output would be more useful if it explicitly mentioned the merge.

Most sensible people probably already have that in their bash prompt, of course, but we have some users at $dayjob who use the anemic windows cmd.exe as their "command shell".

So how about something like this:

$ git status # Merging branch 'master' into topic # Changes to be committed: # # modified: file2

The "branch 'master' into topic" part can come from .git/MERGE_MSG

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 6:12 PM, Eric Raible <raible@gmail.com> wrote:

At my $dayjob, when we switched from cvs to git, I got _lots_ of support questions around people being confused with merges and rebases -- they often didn't realize they were still in the middle of one, or didn't know how to resolve conflicts, or didn't know how to complete the operation (i.e. didn't know that they needed to "commit" or "rebase --continue"), or didn't know how to abort the operation. This despite a few hours of dedicated training on basic git usage for everyone including some nice handouts. [Granted, most developers were engineers that were more interested in engineering and physics than "computer science stuff", didn't have a very strong grasp of version control, plus they had years of brain damage from CVS usage to cope with, so this user group may be uncommon -- at least other than the CVS usage bit.] Fixing the bash prompt would help in reminding people that they were in the middle of an operation, but not the other issues. And most people were stubbornly sticking with tcsh as their shell, preventing even using that solution.

Most such users were using EasyGit (lightweight git-like wrapper designed to assist in avoiding common gotchas for those braindamaged by CVS or SVN), so I quickly modified "eg status" to also print annoying "YOU ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A <OP> OPERATION. TYPE 'eg help topic middle-of-<OP> FOR MORE INFO" notices when relevant[1].

After making that change, support questions dropped _dramatically_.

I'm a bit ashamed I never got around to making that into a proper RFC patch for git (yet?). I'm not sure whether it'd fit git, but it's certainly worth discussion and was amazing how much it helped us.

Elijah

[1] See http://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/documentation/topic-middle-of-merge.html and http://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/documentation/topic-middle-of-rebase.html for what the help pages suggested; there are similar ones for am and bisect as well.

On 7 July 2010 02:12, Eric Raible <raible@gmail.com> wrote:

+1