inexplicable failure to merge recursively across cherry-picks

[martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net>]

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Hi folks,

I hope this is not a daily series of mine, being confused about Git
merging, but I've run my head against a wall again and before
I crush my skull, I'd prefer to reach out to you to help me regain
an understanding.

This is about the new mdadm for Debian packaging effort. You can
clone from git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-mdadm/mdadm-new.git and see
the repo at
http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-mdadm/mdadm-new.git;a=summary. Do not
track as this repo is subject to change.

My master branch was last merged with upstream's mdadm-2.6.2 tag
(commit 263a535). Since then, I've committed a couple of changes to
master including three cherry-picks from upstream since mdadm-2.6.2.

I tagged upstream at the point which I want to merge into master:
mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59. When I merge that tag into master,
I get a merge conflict on Monitor.c:

  <<<<<<< HEAD:Monitor.c
                                  if (mse->devnum != MAXINT &&
  =======
                                  if (mse->devnum != INT_MAX &&
  >>>>>>> upstream:Monitor.c

There are five commits between mdadm-2.6.2 and
mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59 that affect Monitor.c:

  01d9299
  e4dc510
* 66f8bbb
  98127a6
  4450e59

The third commit, the one with the asterisk is the one that
I cherry-picked (as 845eef9); the other two cherries I picked do not
touch Monitor.c.

The fifth/last commit (4450e59) is the one responsible for the
change which seems to cause the conflict. It is the *only* commit
since the common ancestor of *both* branches that touches the
conflicting lines.

The fourth commit (98127a6) inserts a single line at the top of the
file, so that's nothing that would cause a conflict.

To be honest, I can't explain it. But I didn't give up.

I branched master2 off 845eef9b~1, cherry-picked the first two
commits that touch Monitor.c, cherry-picked all the commits
845eef9b..master into master2 and merge upstream...

... to get exactly the same conflict in exactly the same line in
exactly the same file.

What is going on. Am I seriously overestimating Git's merging
capacities, or do I have a bug in my brain?

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
  \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
 
"the only difference between shakespeare and you
 was the size of his idiom list -- not the size of his vocabulary."
                                                      -- alan perlis
 
spamtraps: madduck.bogus@madduck.net

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