user-manual: describe how higher stages are set during a merge
Higher stages store the blobs involved from their side verbatim. Removal of uninteresting hunks are done by "diff --cc" upon demand and not stored in the index. Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Junio C Hamano committed
Jun 12, 2008 at 14:30 UTC
4209752da5a2e327e470493618931a7abbf0a381
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Documentation/user-manual.txt
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@@ -1254,16 +1254,15 @@ these three "file stages" represents a different version of the file:
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-------------------------------------------------
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$ git show :1:file.txt # the file in a common ancestor of both branches
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-$ git show :2:file.txt # the version from HEAD, but including any
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- # nonconflicting changes from MERGE_HEAD
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-$ git show :3:file.txt # the version from MERGE_HEAD, but including any
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- # nonconflicting changes from HEAD.
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+$ git show :2:file.txt # the version from HEAD.
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+$ git show :3:file.txt # the version from MERGE_HEAD.
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-------------------------------------------------
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-Since the stage 2 and stage 3 versions have already been updated with
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-nonconflicting changes, the only remaining differences between them are
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-the important ones; thus linkgit:git-diff[1] can use the information in
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-the index to show only those conflicts.
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+When you ask linkgit:git-diff[1] to show the conflicts, it runs a
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+three-way diff between the conflicted merge results in the work tree with
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+stages 2 and 3 to show only hunks whose contents come from both sides,
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+mixed (in other words, when a hunk's merge results come only from stage 2,
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+that part is not conflicting and is not shown. Same for stage 3).
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The diff above shows the differences between the working-tree version of
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file.txt and the stage 2 and stage 3 versions. So instead of preceding