I'm merging in a remote branch that may have a lot of conflicts. How can I tell if it will have conflicts or not?
I don't see anything like a --dry-run
on git-merge
.
I'm merging in a remote branch that may have a lot of conflicts. How can I tell if it will have conflicts or not?
I don't see anything like a --dry-run
on git-merge
.
As noted previously, pass in the --no-commit
flag, but to avoid a fast-forward commit, also pass in --no-ff
, like so:
$ git merge --no-commit --no-ff $BRANCH
To examine the staged changes:
$ git diff --cached
And you can undo the merge, even if it is a fast-forward merge:
$ git merge --abort
I just had to implement a method that automatically finds conflicts between a repository and its remote. This solution does the merge in memory so it won't touch the index, nor the working tree. I think this is the safest possible way you can solve this problem. Here's how it works:
git fetch origin master
git merge-base FETCH_HEAD master
git merge-tree mergebase master FETCH_HEAD
(mergebase is the hexadecimal id that merge-base printed in the previous step)Now suppose that you want to merge the remote master with your local master, but you can use any branches. git merge-tree
will execute the merge in memory and print the result to the standard output. Grep for the pattern or
>>
. Or you can print the output to a file and check that. If you find a line starting with 'changed in both' then most probably there will be a conflict.
Undoing a merge with git is so easy you shouldn't even worry about the dry run:
$ git pull $REMOTE $BRANCH # uh oh, that wasn't right $ git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD # all is right with the world
EDIT: As noted in the comments below, if you have changes in your working directory or staging area you'll probably want to stash them before doing the above (otherwise they will disappear following the git reset
above)
My brute-force simple solution to this is:
1: create a pre-master branch (from master of course)
2: merge all the things you want to do to this pre-master
then you can see how the merging happened without touching master then.
3a: merge pre-master into master or
3b: merge all wannabe-released branches into master
Anyway I would follow @orange80 advise.
I made an alias for doing this and works like a charm, I do this:
git config --global alias.mergetest '!f(){ git merge --no-commit --no-ff "$1"; git merge --abort; echo "Merge aborted"; };f '
Now I just call
git mergetest
To find out if there are any conflicts.
Just diff your current branch against the remote branch, this will tell you what is going to change when you do a pull/merge.
#see diff between current master and remote branch git diff master origin/master
I use the request-pull git command to do so. It allows you to see every change that would happen when merging, but without doing anything on your local or remote repositories.
For instance, imagine you want to merge a branch named "feature-x" into your master branch
git request-pull master origin feature-x
will show you a summary of what would happen (without doing anything):
The following changes since commit fc01dde318: Layout updates (2015-06-25 11:00:47 +0200) are available in the git repository at: http://fakeurl.com/myrepo.git/ feature-x for you to fetch changes up to 841d3b41ad: ---------------------------------------------------------------- john (2): Adding some layout Refactoring ioserver.js | 8 +++--- package.json | 7 +++++- server.js | 4 +-- layout/ldkdsd.js | 277 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4 files changed, 289 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) create mode 100644 layout/ldkdsd.js
If you add the -p
parameter, you will also get the full patch text, exactly like if you were doing a git diff on every changed file.
This might be interesting: From the documentation:
If you tried a merge which resulted in complex conflicts and want to start over, you can recover with git merge --abort.
But you could also do it the naive (but slow) way:
rm -Rf /tmp/repository cp -r repository /tmp/ cd /tmp/repository git merge ... ...if successful, do the real merge. :)
(Note: It won't work just cloning to /tmp, you'd need a copy, in order to be sure that uncommitted changes will not conflict).
I am aware that this is an old question, but it is the first to appear on a Google search.
Git introduced a --ff-only option when merging.
From: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-merge
--ff-only
Refuse to merge and exit with a non-zero status unless the current HEAD is already up-to-date or the merge can be resolved as a fast-forward.
Doing this will attempt to merge and fast-forward, and if it can't it aborts and prompts you that the fast-forward could not be performed, but leaves your working branch untouched. If it can fast-forward, then it will perform the merge on your working branch. This option is also available on git pull
. Thus, you could do the following:
git pull --ff-only origin branchA #See if you can pull down and merge branchA git merge --ff-only branchA branchB #See if you can merge branchA into branchB
I'm surprised nobody has suggested using patches yet.
Say you'd like to test a merge from your_branch
into master
(I'm assuming you have master
checked out):
$ git diff master your_branch > your_branch.patch $ git apply --check your_branch.patch $ rm your_branch.patch
That should do the trick.
If you get errors like
error: patch failed: test.txt:1 error: test.txt: patch does not apply
that means that the patch wasn't successful and a merge would produce conflicts. No output means the patch is clean and you'd be able to easily merge the branch
Note that this will not actually change your working tree (aside from creating the patch file of course, but you can safely delete that afterwards). From the git-apply documentation:
--check Instead of applying the patch, see if the patch is applicable to the current working tree and/or the index file and detects errors. Turns off "apply".
Note to anyone who is smarter/more experienced with git than me: please do let me know if I'm wrong here and this method does show different behaviour than a regular merge. It seems strange that in the 8+ years that this question has existed noone would suggest this seemingly obvious solution.
I use git log to see what has changed on a feature branch from master branch
git log does_this_branch..contain_this_branch_changes
e.g. - to see what commits are in a feature branch that has/not been merged to master:
git log master..feature_branch
If you want to fast forward from B to A, then you must make sure that git log B..A shows you nothing, i.e. A has nothing that B doesn't have. But even if B..A has something, you might still be able to merge without conflicts, so the above shows two things: that there will be a fast-forward, and thus you won't get a conflict.
Make a temporary copy of your working copy, then merge into that, and diff the two.