git merge recursive theirs, how does it work?

Question

hi,

I'm having a bit of a problem. We have our own CMS which is using git for collaboration and versioning and stuff. Now i have two git repositories A and B, A which is a project and B which is the CMS itself. Now i want to get B into A, but when i do this i get alot of merge-conflicts and the solution for the conflicts is always to use the stuff from B. Now what i think i need is git merge -s recursive theirs because i want to merge and when their is a merge conflict it should be forced to use the solution from B. But i can't get it to work. it always keeps telling me "fatal: 'theirs' does not point to a commit"

does anyone know what i do wrong? the recursive theirs i found here

greets, Daan

Answer 1

I think the reason it's failing is that you are specifying "recursive theirs" as the strategy. "recursive" is a strategy, and when you put a space after it, "theirs" is interpreted as something git needs to merge your working copy with (eg. another branch or refspec).

I think you will not be able to specify a strategy exactly like what you want. There is a strategy called "ours" which is the opposite of what you are wanting.

The usual pattern used in this situation is to either merge or rebase to the "B" repository. From within the "A" repository's working copy, you would do a rebase, if possible (it might not be possible, if you are already sharing the git repo with other developers). A rebase would essentially roll the A repository back to a common commit within both repositories, apply "B" commits, then "A" commits on top. You'd resolve any merge conflicts along the way.

Once you go thru the pain of either merging or rebasing to the "B" repository, the future merges will be less painful.

Answer 2

You must use this form to pass merge strategy options:

git merge -s recursive -Xtheirs

Also make sure your version suppors -Xtheirs, that's a quite recent feature(?)