Trouble with file specific merge strategies

[suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com>]

Hi git devs,

I have a repo with two branches where some files are absent in one of
the branches. Say the two branches are <allfiles> and <somefiles>. Until now
I was using

$ git merge -s ours <allfiles> # with <somefiles> checked out

to merge commits which touches the absent files. But this clutters up
history and is very inconvenient to do sometimes. So when I came across
the possibility of using .gitattributes for file specific merge
strategies, I tried the following:

pattern merge=ours

However I get the following conflict message:

CONFLICT (rename/delete): org-mode-config.el deleted in HEAD and
renamed in 74288bb. Version 74288bb of org-mode-config.el left in
tree.

This file was deleted from <somefiles> in the past[1] and was renamed in
<allfiles> since the last merge. I was expecting this file to be ignored
(or in other words, merged with ours) since the .gitattributes file has
entries like these:

org-mode-config.el	   merge=ours  # new name in allfiles branch
lisp/org-mode-settings.el  merge=ours  # old name deleted in somefiles

I also see other new files in <allfiles> which are mentioned in
.gitattributes being merged in <somefiles>.

$ git status -sb
## somefiles
M  abbrev_defs
A  cpp-config.el
A  email-config.el                 # <-- this should be ignored
A  gui-config.el                   # <-- this should be ignored
UU init.el
A  keybindings.el
M  lisp/skeletons.el
D  lisp/text-mode-like-settings.el
UA org-mode-config.el              # <-- this should be ignored
A  text-mode-config.el

What am I doing wrong here? My git version is 1.7.7.6.

Thanks in advance,


Footnotes:

[1] There has been several successful merges since then.

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.