Re: [boost] [GitHelp] (Mis-)Understanding merge

Subject: Re: [boost] [GitHelp] (Mis-)Understanding merge
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-02-26 09:42:07

On 26 February 2014 14:23, Edward Diener <eldiener_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Just for the sake of argument:
>
> 'develop' has file
> 'master' does not have file
> 'merge base' has file
>
> I tell git to merge from 'develop' to 'master'.
>
> Why would not git see that a file which is in 'develop' and is in the 'merge
> base' but is not in 'master', needs to be added to 'master' as part of the
> three way merge ?

Imagine 'master' and 'develop' are identical. Then you remove the file
in 'master'. This would result in exactly the same situation - the
file would be in 'develop' and the merge base, but not in 'master. And
after a merge, it'd generally be expected that the file would remain
removed. That's the logic behind the merge.

> Thanks ! I need to do more reading about 'merge'.

Don't worry about this too much, this situation only occurred because
of the way the git modules were created. It should be rare in normal
use, only really happening if you do complicated things. It's
unfortunate that this is a lot of Boost maintainers' first experience
with git.