Merging topic branches -- changed file locations.

Hello all,

I'm wondering what people do in the following situation, involving integration branches, topic branches, and directory renames.

We use a workflow, whereby people develop features in local topic branches, and then merge them into designate integration branches. So for instance, given a public integration branch:

integration/foo

and a local topic branch of:

topic/foo

That topic/foo branch would get merged into integration/foo with:

git merge --no-ff integration/foo

... and the result pushed out.

This is working just fine -- except that recently, we had cause to "git mv" a directory -- the result of which has been merged and pushed out on "integration/foo". So for example, throughout the lifetime of "integration/foo", there has been a directory called:

modules/foo

Which has been renamed to:

modules/foo2

That's fine. But now, we've run into a problem, whereby people have local topic branches with outstanding changes on them that need merging to integration/foo. But the commits on these topic branches still have references to "modules/foo", which makes merging them in to the integration/foo branch almost impossible.

What's the best way of solving this? I blindly tested this, by doing a "git mv modules/foo modules/foo2" on "topic/foo" and trying to then merge the result of that to integration/foo -- but that didn't work very well either.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.  I hope my ramblings make sense.

Kindly,

-- Thomas Adam