Re: Is there a way to exclude user-specified files or directories from participating in merges?

[Brent Goodrick <bgoodr@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> So at work, you would have a checkout of your work "deployment branch",
> and find needs to change things.  It is Ok to edit both work.sh and
> generic.sh (without being able to edit both, it would be hard to verify if
> the changes would work together) at this time, but don't commit the result
> in the work branch.
>
> Save the changes to work.sh away (e.g. "git diff work.sh >P.diff" and then
> "git checkout HEAD work.sh"), switch to the common branch, and commit the
> changes to the generic file.  Switch back to the deployment branch, merge
> the common branch (to pick up the changes to home.sh), reapply the changes
> specific to the deployment you saved earlier (e.g. "git apply P.diff"),
> tne commit the result.
>

Thanks. Well, I should have said in my initial request: "Without
manually forwarding changes from branch to branch and without having
to remember special rules about what I can and cannot merge into which
branch", since that is likely to get forgotten. :)

The answer I am hearing you say is that git doesn't have a way to
automatically exclude files akin to how rsync handles include/exclude.
 Is that what you are saying? Or, could the hook mechanism be
exploited to get this behavior?

bg