Re: problem with cherry-picking a commit which comes before introducing a new submodule

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Yaroslav Halchenko wrote [abbreviated]:

> Merging HEAD with todonotloose
> Merging:
> 855981d just placeholders in the abstract
> a00c497 Initial draft for HBM abstract.
> CONFLICT (file/directory): There is a directory with name frontiers/code in todonotloose. Adding frontiers/code as
> +frontiers/code~HEAD
> %         git ls-files -u
> 160000 a2b5787 2   frontiers/code
> %         git diff-tree todonotloose
> a00c497
> :040000 040000 40427e34 c7ba910 M	poster-hbm2011_neurodebian
> %         git diff-tree todonotloose^ HEAD
> :100644 100644 378e137 c39ced7 M	.gitmodules
> :000000 040000 0000000 141dbc1 A	challenge-execpapers
> :040000 040000 401fd66 ee190f0 M	frontiers
> :040000 040000 26c884a ad3e829 M	sty

One more piece of protocol: what git version are you using?  The
release notes mention a fix in this area in v1.7.3[1]:

 * "git merge -s recursive" (which is the default) did not handle cases
   where a directory becomes a file (or vice versa) very well.

Hopefully this is that.  In any case, sounds like a bug.

(Hopefully someone else can comment on why cherry-pick uses the
merge machinery to notice conflicts that would not be clear from
the patch alone.)

Thanks again.
Jonathan

[1] There is an updated Debian source package at [2].  Or, probably
faster: one can use the build result in bin-wrappers/ from a git.git
clone in place.
[2] http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/g/git/git_1.7.4~rc1-0.1.dsc