1MERGE STRATEGIES 2---------------- 3 4The merge mechanism ('git-merge' and 'git-pull' commands) allows the 5backend 'merge strategies' to be chosen with `-s` option. Some strategies 6can also take their own options, which can be passed by giving `-X<option>` 7arguments to 'git-merge' and/or 'git-pull'. 8 9resolve:: 10 This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch 11 and another branch you pulled from) using a 3-way merge 12 algorithm. It tries to carefully detect criss-cross 13 merge ambiguities and is considered generally safe and 14 fast. 15 16recursive:: 17 This can only resolve two heads using a 3-way merge 18 algorithm. When there is more than one common 19 ancestor that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a 20 merged tree of the common ancestors and uses that as 21 the reference tree for the 3-way merge. This has been 22 reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without 23 causing mis-merges by tests done on actual merge commits 24 taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history. 25 Additionally this can detect and handle merges involving 26 renames. This is the default merge strategy when 27 pulling or merging one branch. 28+ 29The 'recursive' strategy can take the following options: 30 31ours;; 32 This option forces conflicting hunks to be auto-resolved cleanly by 33 favoring 'our' version. Changes from the other tree that do not 34 conflict with our side are reflected to the merge result. 35+ 36This should not be confused with the 'ours' merge strategy, which does not 37even look at what the other tree contains at all. It discards everything 38the other tree did, declaring 'our' history contains all that happened in it. 39 40theirs;; 41 This is opposite of 'ours'. 42 43renormalize;; 44 This runs a virtual check-out and check-in of all three stages 45 of a file when resolving a three-way merge. This option is 46 meant to be used when merging branches with different clean 47 filters or end-of-line normalization rules. See "Merging 48 branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in 49 linkgit:gitattributes[5] for details. 50 51no-renormalize;; 52 Disables the `renormalize` option. This overrides the 53 `merge.renormalize` configuration variable. 54 55subtree[=<path>];; 56 This option is a more advanced form of 'subtree' strategy, where 57 the strategy makes a guess on how two trees must be shifted to 58 match with each other when merging. Instead, the specified path 59 is prefixed (or stripped from the beginning) to make the shape of 60 two trees to match. 61 62octopus:: 63 This resolves cases with more than two heads, but refuses to do 64 a complex merge that needs manual resolution. It is 65 primarily meant to be used for bundling topic branch 66 heads together. This is the default merge strategy when 67 pulling or merging more than one branch. 68 69ours:: 70 This resolves any number of heads, but the resulting tree of the 71 merge is always that of the current branch head, effectively 72 ignoring all changes from all other branches. It is meant to 73 be used to supersede old development history of side 74 branches. Note that this is different from the -Xours option to 75 the 'recursive' merge strategy. 76 77subtree:: 78 This is a modified recursive strategy. When merging trees A and 79 B, if B corresponds to a subtree of A, B is first adjusted to 80 match the tree structure of A, instead of reading the trees at 81 the same level. This adjustment is also done to the common 82 ancestor tree.