Subject: Re: [RFC 0/3] Make git more user-friendly during a merge conflict

From: Stephen Leake <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2014 04:32:29 -0600

David Kastrup <[email-masked]> writes:

> Stephen Leake <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> David Kastrup <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>>> Stephen Leake <[email-masked]> writes:
>>>
>>>> David Kastrup <[email-masked]> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> "do the right thing" commands also tend to do the wrong thing
>>>>> occasionally with potentially disastrous results when they are used
>>>>> in scripts where the followup actions rely on the actual result.
>>>>
>>>> That is bad, and should not be allowed. On the other hand, I have yet
>>>> to see an actual use case of bad behavior in this discussion.
>>>
>>> Huh.
>>>
>>> <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/242744>
>>
>> That's about backward incompatibility, which is bad, but not what I was
>> talking about above.
>
> No, it isn't.  I quote:
>
>     I sometimes run "git reset" during a merge to only reset the index
>     and then examine the changes introduced by the merge. With your
>     changes, someone doing so would abort the merge and discard the
>     merge resolution.  I very rarely do this, but even rarely, I
>     wouldn't like Git to start droping data silently for me ;-).
>
> You should not make statements like "I have yet to see an actual use
> case of bad behavior in this discussion" when you actually mean "I have
> not yet seen anything I would be interested in doing myself".

Clearly I misunderstood your point. Merely repeating the same statement
that I misunderstood, and adding a misunderstanding of what I said, is
not helpful.

So let me see if I can expand on your use case:

- you do 'git merge', which results in conflicts

- you edit some workspace files to resolve some of those conflicts 

    (I added this step later, since it was implied but not explicit)

- you do 'git reset', intending 'git reset --mixed' (because that is the
  current default)

    Actually, I can't find a precise definition of 'git reset'. Here is
    the synopsis from the man page for 'git-reset' (from git 1.7.9):

       git reset [-q] [<commit>] [--] <paths>...
       git reset (--patch | -p) [<commit>] [--] [<paths>...]
       git reset (--soft | --mixed | --hard | --merge | --keep) [-q] [<commit>]

    In 'git reset', there is no path, so it must be the second or third
    form. But those _require_ one of the -- options. So 'git reset' is
    illegal. Clearly something is wrong here; apparently the third line
    should be:

       git reset [--soft | --mixed | --hard | --merge | --keep] [-q] [<commit>]

    with '--mixed' as the default, as is stated later. (perhaps the
    original intent was to not have a default for the third form, but
    that got changed sometime?).

    This command "resets the index" but not the working tree. I'm not
    clear what "reset the index" means here; does it mean "remove all
    entries from the index", or "reset the index to some previous
    state"? In other man pages, "reset" can have either meaning
    depending on context.

- then you "examine changes introduced by the merge". I don't know what
  this means in detail. 

    Before resetting the index, you could diff a workspace file against
    either HEAD or index. Now you can only diff against HEAD, so I don't
    understand why you wanted to reset the index. That's not relevant to
    this use case; I'll just accept that resetting the index is a useful
    thing to do here. But I would like to understand why.

- with the "do the right thing" patch, 'git reset' does 'git reset
  --merge' instead

    That "Resets the index and updates the files in the working tree
    that are different between <commit> and HEAD". 

    "<commit>" in this case defaults to HEAD, so the working tree is
    not changed.

So as I understand it, this does _not_ lose your conflict resolutions.

In fact, it now seems that 'git reset --mixed' is always the same as
'git reset --merge'. So I must be missing something!

-- 
-- Stephe