CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitmergeconflict
schaazzz
schaazzz

Reputation: 568

Selective Merge/Conflict Resolution

I'm involved in a fairly large project which has a lot of developers. For a certain feature development, a new branch was created (let's call this branch feature_a).

Now while trying to merge the master into feature_a, there are multiple conflicts in various "modules", where different developers are responsible for these modules.

How can I independently resolve conflicts in files I'm responsible for and leave the other files unmerged?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 198

Answers (1)

LeGEC
LeGEC

Reputation: 51780

You could rewrite the history of feature_a, to split it in a list of commits where each commit is the responsibility of one single developper, then have each developper merge its "own" code back into master.

Here is an outline for this idea :

# from branch feature_a :

# create a new branch :
$ git checkout -b merge_feature_a

# find commit where it forked from `master` :
$ git merge-base master feature_1
0125638

# reset current merge_feature_a to this commit :
$ git reset 0125638

# diff feature_a and merge-base to get the full list of modified files :
$ git diff --name-only 0125638 feature_a

# create first commit with files which are Mike's responsibility :
$ git add <files for Mike>
$ git commit -m "feature_a for Mike"

# same for Sally :
$ git add <files for Sally>
$ git commit -m "feature_a for Sally"

# etc ...

# push this new branch :
$ git push origin merge_feature_a

# tell Mike to merge first commit,
# when he's done tell Sally to merge second commit,
# etc ...

What you get this way is a sequence of merge commits, where the end result is (hopefully) the content you wish for.

Bonus points : create a merge commit at the right spot in history

Once the merging process is completed, you can fiddle with the history, so that this content is shown as a commit joining both the orignal master branch and the original feature_a branch :

# from master :

# rewind master to its state before any merge :
# use '--soft' to keep every modifications in the index
#  (your next commit will have this content)
$ git reset --soft 1e67a9bb   # <- insert the hash of the original master

# get the sha1 of the commit for feature_a :
$ git rev-parse feature_a
e9573881e2eff04d219e57dfd4d7739aa5c11693

# write this hash into '.git/MERGE_HEAD' :
$ git rev-parse feature_a > .git/MERGE_HEAD

# commit : the presence of the MERGE_HEAD file indicates a merge commit
$ git commit

Upvotes: 1

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