Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] Add -k/--keep-going option to mergetool

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:12:27 -0500

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 01:25:12PM +0000, Charles Bailey wrote:
> Previously, if you aborted a merge, you were left with the
> base/local/remote temporaries for the merge that you aborted.
> 
> To be honest, I found this a little irritating. The base, local and
> remote temporaries are inputs so are accessible from slots 1,2 and 3 of
> the index, and any intermediate output will be in the target file. You
> can git clean, but if you have other temporaries you need to keep, you
> end up having to manually clean them up in any case.

I agree.  On occasion it's useful, but more often than not, keeping
the temporaries is more annoying than anything else.  At the time when
I wrote mergetool, it was a pain for me to either do "git ls-files
--stage" and then cut and paste the SHA hash, or to type commands like
"git cat-file blob :1:long/pathname/from/the/top.c" to look one
various staged versions of the file.   

I'd suggest that this is probably worth turning into an option
(-k|--keep-files), and default the answer to deleting the temporaries
before mergetool exits.

						- Ted