threads / discuss / 37989

Merge without marking conflicts in working tree

Subject: Merge without marking conflicts in working tree

## tl;dr

3 messages between Nov 17, 2014 and Nov 17, 2014.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

Aaron Schrab· Nov 17, 2014, 22:38 UTC · lore

Is there a way to do a merge but only record conflicts in the index, not update the working versions of files with conflict markers?

Like many people, I use git to manage configuration files for my shell, editor, git itself, and a number of other things. The vast majority of times that I update things no conflicts are occur and everything just works, so I'd like to avoid extra work in this case. But occasionally a conflict will occur, and if it's in a file that will be read while trying to resolve the conflict this can make things more difficult.

I'd like to find a way to have the conflict recorded in just the index without touching the working tree. I could then use my usual tools to resolve the conflict without the errors caused by the conflict markers. I generally use vim+fugitive to resolve conflicts anyway, and typically the first step I take is to replace the working-tree version with the merge-base version, completely ignoring any conflict markers.

If there isn't currently a way to do this, I was thinking of implementing something like an "ours" value for merge.conflictstyle configuration.

Junio C Hamano· Nov 17, 2014, 23:19 UTC · re: Aaron Schrab · lore

Re: Merge without marking conflicts in working tree

Aaron Schrab <aaron@schrab.com> writes:

> Is there a way to do a merge but only record conflicts in the index,
> not update the working versions of files with conflict markers?

Not with Porcelain, but "read-tree -m <ancestor> <ours> <theirs>" should give you something close to it.

"merge-recursive" is probably beyond salvaging and coaxing --cached option (i.e. tell a command that usually works both on the index and on the working tree to only work on the index) into it would be too messy to think about. Restructuring it so that it first computes the end result only in the index and then optionally allows it to check out to the working tree has been something I've wanted to do for a long time, but there is only limited amount of time in a day and the list is never dormant, so... X-<.

Andreas Schwab· Nov 17, 2014, 23:20 UTC · re: Aaron Schrab · lore

Re: Merge without marking conflicts in working tree

Aaron Schrab <aaron@schrab.com> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Is there a way to do a merge but only record conflicts in the index, not
> update the working versions of files with conflict markers?
>
> Like many people, I use git to manage configuration files for my shell,
> editor, git itself, and a number of other things.  The vast majority of
> times that I update things no conflicts are occur and everything just
> works, so I'd like to avoid extra work in this case.  But occasionally a
> conflict will occur, and if it's in a file that will be read while trying
> to resolve the conflict this can make things more difficult.

You could perform the merge in a separate working directory. The only extra step required is a checkout to deploy the new revision, which could be triggered automatically by a hook.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
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