Re: Files different for me

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

>> You, I and experienced users know what to do.  Deal *only* with the last
>> kind, mark them with "git add" after you are done with each of them, and
>> make sure you do not say "-a" when committing the result, to exclude the
>> first kind from the merge result.
>> 
>> I've been wondering if we can make this safer for others.
>
> You're right. We could decide to have a mode (maybe default to it, so that 
> people like me can just use a config option to enable "expert" mode) that
> simply refuses to do the merge if it doesn't succeed cleanly if there were 
> dirty files in the tree.

"git merge" has always had this "stash away local changes before starting,
and unstash once done" safety when we try to run multiple strategies.
A patch to trigger it even for a single strategy case may be trivial.