Re: Merge into locally modified files?

[Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>]

On Monday 08 June 2009, skillzero@gmail.com wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Johan Herland <johan@herland.net> wrote:
> > Git, instead encourages you to commit your changes _first_
> > (aka. "commit-before-merge"), so that your changes are not necessarily
> > affected by the updated changes from the server.
>
> The problem I have with this is that it's a lot of extra work to
> commit, pull (which will create a merge commit), then back out the
> merge commit git pull did, back out my local commit, then re-apply my
> local changes.

I never suggested you do something convoluted like that. What I suggested 
was:

1. "git commit" your local changes
2. "git pull --rebase"

After this, your local changes will be on top of the pulled changes. (Then 
you can put them on a separate branch, if you're paranoid about accidentally 
pushing them to the server.)

> I typically always have some modified files in my tree
> for little things I may never want to commit. I'll tweak some build
> Makefile build setting (e.g. enable extra logging, some debug printfs,
> etc.). These changes are very transient. We tend to pull in changes
> several times a day as people change stuff.

Yes, and that's why I suggest you keep your debug stuff on a separate 
branch, so that it's easily separated from the mainline development.

> It looks like I can use git stash to help here. If I do 'git stash &&
> git pull && git stash pop', it seemed to work in a simple example.

Yes, that's another way of doing it; possibly better than my suggestion.

> If I had no changes, I'd need to be careful to not try to do a git stash
> pop since it would haven't stashed anything.

If this is the only thing you use 'git stash' for, you could start off with 
a 'git stash clear'. That way, there would be nothing to 'pop' if there was 
nothing to 'stash'.

> Is this something that would be pretty easy to add to git pull (or I
> guess really to git merge since pull is just fetch+merge)? Maybe
> something like a 'git pull --rebase-local'? If I wanted to add
> something like this, should I just start by looking at git stash and
> see how it does it and try to integrate support for that into git
> merge (and make sure git pull will pass that option through to git
> merge)? Conceptually, it seems easy, but I don't know how hard it
> would be to get it into the code.

Feel free to whip up a patch. I can't say whether it'll be accepted or not.


Have fun! :)

...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, <johan@herland.net>
www.herland.net