Is there a theirs version of git merge -s ours

Question

When merging topic branch  B  into  A  using git merge  I get some conflicts  I know all the conflicts can be solved using the version in  B    I am aware of git merge -s ours  But what I want is something like git merge -s theirs    Why doesn t it exist  How can I achieve the same result after the conflicting merge with existing git commands   git checkout every unmerged file from B   UPDATE  The  solution  of just discarding anything from branch A  the merge commit point to B version of the tree  is not what I am looking for

User · Answer

This answer was given by Paul Pladijs  I just took his commands and made a git alias for convenience   Edit your  gitconfig and add the following    alias      mergetheirs     git merge -s ours    1    amp  amp  git branch temp THEIRS  amp  amp  git reset --hard    1    amp  amp  git reset --soft temp THEIRS  amp  amp  git commit --amend  amp  amp  git branch -D temp THEIRS    Then you can  git merge -s theirs A  by running   git checkout B  optional  just making sure we re on branch B  git mergetheirs A

User · Answer

This answer was given by Paul Pladijs  I just took his commands and made a git alias for convenience   Edit your  gitconfig and add the following    alias      mergetheirs     git merge -s ours    1    amp  amp  git branch temp THEIRS  amp  amp  git reset --hard    1    amp  amp  git reset --soft temp THEIRS  amp  amp  git commit --amend  amp  amp  git branch -D temp THEIRS    Then you can  git merge -s theirs A  by running   git checkout B  optional  just making sure we re on branch B  git mergetheirs A

User · Answer

I used the answer from Paul Pladijs since now  I found out  you can do a  normal  merge  conflicts occur  so you do   git checkout --theirs  lt file gt    to resolve the conflict by using the revision from the other branch  If you do this for each file  you have the same behaviour as you would expect from   git merge  lt branch gt  -s theirs   Anyway  the effort is more than it would be with the merge-strategy   This was tested with git version 1 8 0

User · Answer

The equivalent which keep parent order  to  git merge -s theirs branchB   Before merge       Make sure you are in clean state      Do the merge   git commit-tree -m  take theirs  -p HEAD -p branchB  branchB  tree   git reset --hard 36daf519952   is the output of the prev command   What we did    We created a new commit which two parents ours and theirs and the contnet of the commit is branchB - theirs  After merge   More precisely   git commit-tree -m  take theirs  -p HEAD -p  SOURCE  commit    SOURCE  tree

User · Answer

Older versions of git allowed you to use the  theirs  merge strategy   git pull --strategy theirs remote branch   But this has since been removed  as explained in this message by Junio Hamano  the Git maintainer    As noted in the link  instead you would do this   git fetch origin git reset --hard origin   Beware  though  that this is different than an actual merge   Your solution is probably the option you re really looking for

User · Answer

This will merge your newBranch in existing baseBranch  git checkout  lt baseBranch gt     this will checkout baseBranch git merge -s ours  lt newBranch gt     this will simple merge newBranch in baseBranch git rm -rf      this will remove all non references files from baseBranch  deleted in newBranch  git checkout newBranch --     this will replace all conflicted files in baseBranch

User · Answer

Why doesn t it exist    While I mention in  git command for making one branch like another  how to simulate git merge -s theirs  note that Git 2 15  Q4 2017  is now clearer      The documentation for  -X lt option gt   for merges was misleadingly   written to suggest that  -s theirs  exists  which is not the case    See commit c25d98b  25 Sep 2017  by Junio C Hamano  gitster    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 4da3e23  28 Sep 2017        merge-strategies  avoid implying that  -s theirs  exists      The description of -Xours merge option has a parenthetical note   that tells the readers that it is very different from -s ours    which is correct  but the description of -Xtheirs that follows it   carelessly says  this is the opposite of ours   giving a false   impression that the readers also need to be warned that it is very   different from -s theirs  which in reality does not even exist    -Xtheirs is a strategy option applied to recursive strategy  This means that recursive strategy will still merge anything it can  and will only fall back to  theirs  logic in case of conflicts   That debate for the pertinence or not of a theirs merge strategy was brought back recently in this Sept  2017 thread  It acknowledges older  2008  threads      In short  the previous discussion can be summarized to  we don t want  -s theirs  as it encourages the wrong workflow       It mentions the alias   mtheirs    sh -c  git merge -s ours --no-commit  1  amp  amp  git read-tree -m -u  1  -   Yaroslav Halchenko tries to advocate once more for that strategy  but Junio C  Hamano adds      The reason why ours and theirs are not symmetric is because you are you and not them---the control and ownership of our history and their history is not symmetric       Once you decide that their history is the mainline  you d rather want to treat your line of development as a side branch and make a merge in that direction  i e  the first parent of the resulting merge is a commit on their history and the second parent is the last bad one of your history   So you would end up using  checkout their-history  amp  amp  merge -s ours your-history  to   keep the first-parenthood sensible       And at that point  use of  -s ours  is no longer a workaround for lack of  -s theirs     It is a proper part of the desired semantics  i e  from the point of view of the surviving canonical history line  you want to preserve what it did  nullifying what the other line of history did    Junio adds  as commented by Mike Beaton      git merge -s ours  lt their-ref gt  effectively says  mark commits made up to  lt their-ref gt  on their branch as commits to be permanently ignored     and this matters because  if you subsequently merge from later states of their branch  their later changes will be brought in without the ignored changes ever being brought in

User · Answer

When merging topic branch  quot B quot  in  quot A quot  using git merge  I get some conflicts  I  gt know all the conflicts can be solved using the version in  quot B quot   I am aware of git merge -s ours  But what I want is something like git merge  gt -s their   I m assuming that you created a branch off of master and now want to merge back into master  overriding any of the old stuff in master  That s exactly what I wanted to do when I came across this post  Do exactly what it is you want to do  Except merge the one branch into the other first  I just did this  and it worked great  git checkout Branch git merge master -s ours  Then  checkout master and merge your branch in it  it will go smoothly now   git checkout master git merge Branch

User · Answer

See Junio Hamano s widely cited answer  if you re going to discard committed content  just discard the commits  or at any rate keep it out of the main history   Why bother everyone in the future reading commit messages from commits that have nothing to offer   But sometimes there are administrative requirements  or perhaps some other reason   For those situations where you really have to record commits that contribute nothing  you want    edit  wow  did I manage to get this wrong before  This one works    git update-ref HEAD            git commit-tree -m  completely superseding with branchB content                            -p HEAD -p branchB    branchB    git reset --hard

User · Answer

I solved my problem using  git checkout -m old git checkout -b new B git merge -s ours old

User · Answer

It is not entirely clear what your desired outcome is  so there is some confusion about the  correct  way of doing it in the answers and their comments  I try to give an overview and see the following three options   Try merge and use B for conflicts  This is not the  theirs version for git merge -s ours  but the  theirs version for git merge -X ours   which is short for git merge -s recursive -X ours      git checkout branchA   also uses -s recursive implicitly git merge -X theirs branchB   This is what e g  Alan W  Smith s answer does   Use content from B only  This creates a merge commit for both branches but discards all changes from branchA and only keeps the contents from branchB     Get the content you want to keep    If you want to keep branchB at the current commit  you can add --detached    else it will be advanced to the merge commit in the next step  git checkout branchB    Do the merge an keep current  our  content from branchB we just checked out  git merge -s ours branchA    Set branchA to current commit and check it out  git checkout -B branchA   Note that the merge commits first parent now is that from branchB and only the second is from branchA  This is what e g  Gandalf458 s answer does   Use content from B only and keep correct parent order  This is the real  theirs version for git merge -s ours   It has the same content as in the option before  i e  only that from branchB  but the order of parents is correct  i e  the first parent comes from branchA and the second from branchB   git checkout branchA    Do a merge commit  The content of this commit does not matter    so use a strategy that never fails    Note  This advances branchA  git merge -s ours branchB    Change working tree and index to desired content    --detach ensures branchB will not move when doing the reset in the next step  git checkout --detach branchB    Move HEAD to branchA without changing contents of working tree and index  git reset --soft branchA     attach  HEAD to branchA    This ensures branchA will move when doing  commit --amend   git checkout branchA    Change content of merge commit to current index  i e  content of branchB   git commit --amend -C HEAD   This is what Paul Pladijs s answer does  without requiring a temporary branch

User · Answer

The equivalent which keep parent order  to  git merge -s theirs branchB   Before merge       Make sure you are in clean state      Do the merge   git commit-tree -m  take theirs  -p HEAD -p branchB  branchB  tree   git reset --hard 36daf519952   is the output of the prev command   What we did    We created a new commit which two parents ours and theirs and the contnet of the commit is branchB - theirs  After merge   More precisely   git commit-tree -m  take theirs  -p HEAD -p  SOURCE  commit    SOURCE  tree

User · Answer

Older versions of git allowed you to use the  theirs  merge strategy   git pull --strategy theirs remote branch   But this has since been removed  as explained in this message by Junio Hamano  the Git maintainer    As noted in the link  instead you would do this   git fetch origin git reset --hard origin   Beware  though  that this is different than an actual merge   Your solution is probably the option you re really looking for

User · Answer

I just recently needed to do this for two separate repositories that share a common history   I started with    Org repository1 master Org repository2 master   I wanted all the changes from repository2 master to be applied to repository1 master  accepting all changes that repository2 would make   In git s terms  this should be a strategy called -s theirs BUT it does not exist   Be careful because -X theirs is named like it would be what you want  but it is NOT the same  it even says so in the man page    The way I solved this was to go to repository2 and make a new branch repo1-merge   In that branch  I ran git pull git gitlab com Org repository1 -s ours and it merges fine with no issues   I then push it to the remote   Then I go back to repository1 and make a new branch repo2-merge   In that branch  I run git pull git gitlab com Org repository2 repo1-merge which will complete with issues   Finally  you would either need to issue a merge request in repository1 to make it the new master  or just keep it as a branch

User · Answer

Older versions of git allowed you to use the  theirs  merge strategy   git pull --strategy theirs remote branch   But this has since been removed  as explained in this message by Junio Hamano  the Git maintainer    As noted in the link  instead you would do this   git fetch origin git reset --hard origin   Beware  though  that this is different than an actual merge   Your solution is probably the option you re really looking for

User · Answer

To really properly do a merge which takes only input from the branch you are merging you can do  git merge --strategy ours ref-to-be-merged  git diff --binary ref-to-be-merged   git apply --reverse --index  git commit --amend  There will be no conflicts in any scenario I know of  you don t have to make additional branches  and it acts like a normal merge commit   This doesn t play nice with submodules however

User · Answer

It is not entirely clear what your desired outcome is  so there is some confusion about the  correct  way of doing it in the answers and their comments  I try to give an overview and see the following three options   Try merge and use B for conflicts  This is not the  theirs version for git merge -s ours  but the  theirs version for git merge -X ours   which is short for git merge -s recursive -X ours      git checkout branchA   also uses -s recursive implicitly git merge -X theirs branchB   This is what e g  Alan W  Smith s answer does   Use content from B only  This creates a merge commit for both branches but discards all changes from branchA and only keeps the contents from branchB     Get the content you want to keep    If you want to keep branchB at the current commit  you can add --detached    else it will be advanced to the merge commit in the next step  git checkout branchB    Do the merge an keep current  our  content from branchB we just checked out  git merge -s ours branchA    Set branchA to current commit and check it out  git checkout -B branchA   Note that the merge commits first parent now is that from branchB and only the second is from branchA  This is what e g  Gandalf458 s answer does   Use content from B only and keep correct parent order  This is the real  theirs version for git merge -s ours   It has the same content as in the option before  i e  only that from branchB  but the order of parents is correct  i e  the first parent comes from branchA and the second from branchB   git checkout branchA    Do a merge commit  The content of this commit does not matter    so use a strategy that never fails    Note  This advances branchA  git merge -s ours branchB    Change working tree and index to desired content    --detach ensures branchB will not move when doing the reset in the next step  git checkout --detach branchB    Move HEAD to branchA without changing contents of working tree and index  git reset --soft branchA     attach  HEAD to branchA    This ensures branchA will move when doing  commit --amend   git checkout branchA    Change content of merge commit to current index  i e  content of branchB   git commit --amend -C HEAD   This is what Paul Pladijs s answer does  without requiring a temporary branch

User · Answer

This one uses a git plumbing command read-tree  but makes for a shorter overall workflow   git checkout  lt base-branch gt   git merge --no-commit -s ours  lt their-branch gt  git read-tree -u --reset  lt their-branch gt  git commit    Check your work  git diff  lt their-branch gt

User · Answer

I think what you actually want is   git checkout -B mergeBranch branchB git merge -s ours branchA git checkout branchA git merge mergeBranch git branch -D mergeBranch   This seems clumsy  but it should work  The only think I really dislike about this solution is the git history will be confusing      But at least the history will be completely preserved and you won t need to do something special for deleted files

User · Answer

A possible and tested solution for merging branchB into our checked-out branchA     in case branchA is not our current branch git checkout branchA    make merge commit but without conflicts     the contents of  ours  will be discarded later git merge -s ours branchB        make temporary branch to merged commit git branch branchTEMP             get contents of working tree and index to the one of branchB git reset --hard branchB    reset to our merged commit but    keep contents of working tree and index git reset --soft branchTEMP    change the contents of the merged commit   with the contents of branchB git commit --amend    get rid off our temporary branch git branch -D branchTEMP    verify that the merge commit contains only contents of branchB git diff HEAD branchB   To automate it you can wrap it into a script using branchA and branchB as arguments   This solution preserves the first and second parent of the merge commit  just as you would expect of git merge -s theirs branchB

User · Answer

If you are on branch A do   git merge -s recursive -X theirs B   Tested on git version 1 7 8

User · Answer

Add the -X option to theirs  For example   git checkout branchA git merge -X theirs branchB   Everything will merge in the desired way   The only thing I ve seen cause problems is if files were deleted from branchB  They show up as conflicts if something other than git did the removal   The fix is easy  Just run git rm with the name of any files that were deleted   git rm  DELETED-FILE-NAME    After that  the -X theirs should work as expected    Of course  doing the actual removal with the git rm command will prevent the conflict from happening in the first place     Note  A longer form option also exists    To use it  replace   -X theirs   with   --strategy-option theirs

User · Answer

Why doesn t it exist    While I mention in  git command for making one branch like another  how to simulate git merge -s theirs  note that Git 2 15  Q4 2017  is now clearer      The documentation for  -X lt option gt   for merges was misleadingly   written to suggest that  -s theirs  exists  which is not the case    See commit c25d98b  25 Sep 2017  by Junio C Hamano  gitster    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 4da3e23  28 Sep 2017        merge-strategies  avoid implying that  -s theirs  exists      The description of -Xours merge option has a parenthetical note   that tells the readers that it is very different from -s ours    which is correct  but the description of -Xtheirs that follows it   carelessly says  this is the opposite of ours   giving a false   impression that the readers also need to be warned that it is very   different from -s theirs  which in reality does not even exist    -Xtheirs is a strategy option applied to recursive strategy  This means that recursive strategy will still merge anything it can  and will only fall back to  theirs  logic in case of conflicts   That debate for the pertinence or not of a theirs merge strategy was brought back recently in this Sept  2017 thread  It acknowledges older  2008  threads      In short  the previous discussion can be summarized to  we don t want  -s theirs  as it encourages the wrong workflow       It mentions the alias   mtheirs    sh -c  git merge -s ours --no-commit  1  amp  amp  git read-tree -m -u  1  -   Yaroslav Halchenko tries to advocate once more for that strategy  but Junio C  Hamano adds      The reason why ours and theirs are not symmetric is because you are you and not them---the control and ownership of our history and their history is not symmetric       Once you decide that their history is the mainline  you d rather want to treat your line of development as a side branch and make a merge in that direction  i e  the first parent of the resulting merge is a commit on their history and the second parent is the last bad one of your history   So you would end up using  checkout their-history  amp  amp  merge -s ours your-history  to   keep the first-parenthood sensible       And at that point  use of  -s ours  is no longer a workaround for lack of  -s theirs     It is a proper part of the desired semantics  i e  from the point of view of the surviving canonical history line  you want to preserve what it did  nullifying what the other line of history did    Junio adds  as commented by Mike Beaton      git merge -s ours  lt their-ref gt  effectively says  mark commits made up to  lt their-ref gt  on their branch as commits to be permanently ignored     and this matters because  if you subsequently merge from later states of their branch  their later changes will be brought in without the ignored changes ever being brought in

User · Answer

If you are on branch A do   git merge -s recursive -X theirs B   Tested on git version 1 7 8

User · Answer

This one uses a git plumbing command read-tree  but makes for a shorter overall workflow   git checkout  lt base-branch gt   git merge --no-commit -s ours  lt their-branch gt  git read-tree -u --reset  lt their-branch gt  git commit    Check your work  git diff  lt their-branch gt

User · Answer

To really properly do a merge which takes only input from the branch you are merging you can do  git merge --strategy ours ref-to-be-merged  git diff --binary ref-to-be-merged   git apply --reverse --index  git commit --amend  There will be no conflicts in any scenario I know of  you don t have to make additional branches  and it acts like a normal merge commit   This doesn t play nice with submodules however

User · Answer

I solved my problem using  git checkout -m old git checkout -b new B git merge -s ours old

User · Answer

I think what you actually want is   git checkout -B mergeBranch branchB git merge -s ours branchA git checkout branchA git merge mergeBranch git branch -D mergeBranch   This seems clumsy  but it should work  The only think I really dislike about this solution is the git history will be confusing      But at least the history will be completely preserved and you won t need to do something special for deleted files

User · Answer

See Junio Hamano s widely cited answer  if you re going to discard committed content  just discard the commits  or at any rate keep it out of the main history   Why bother everyone in the future reading commit messages from commits that have nothing to offer   But sometimes there are administrative requirements  or perhaps some other reason   For those situations where you really have to record commits that contribute nothing  you want    edit  wow  did I manage to get this wrong before  This one works    git update-ref HEAD            git commit-tree -m  completely superseding with branchB content                            -p HEAD -p branchB    branchB    git reset --hard

User · Answer

A simple and intuitive  in my opinion  two-step way of doing it is  git checkout branchB   git commit -m  Picked up the content from branchB    followed by  git merge -s ours branchB    which marks the two branches as merged   The only disadvantage is that it does not remove files which have been deleted in branchB from your current branch  A simple diff between the two branches afterwards will show if there are any such files   This approach also makes it clear from the revision log afterwards what was done - and what was intended

User · Answer

I used the answer from Paul Pladijs since now  I found out  you can do a  normal  merge  conflicts occur  so you do   git checkout --theirs  lt file gt    to resolve the conflict by using the revision from the other branch  If you do this for each file  you have the same behaviour as you would expect from   git merge  lt branch gt  -s theirs   Anyway  the effort is more than it would be with the merge-strategy   This was tested with git version 1 8 0

User · Answer

I just recently needed to do this for two separate repositories that share a common history   I started with    Org repository1 master Org repository2 master   I wanted all the changes from repository2 master to be applied to repository1 master  accepting all changes that repository2 would make   In git s terms  this should be a strategy called -s theirs BUT it does not exist   Be careful because -X theirs is named like it would be what you want  but it is NOT the same  it even says so in the man page    The way I solved this was to go to repository2 and make a new branch repo1-merge   In that branch  I ran git pull git gitlab com Org repository1 -s ours and it merges fine with no issues   I then push it to the remote   Then I go back to repository1 and make a new branch repo2-merge   In that branch  I run git pull git gitlab com Org repository2 repo1-merge which will complete with issues   Finally  you would either need to issue a merge request in repository1 to make it the new master  or just keep it as a branch

User · Answer

A possible and tested solution for merging branchB into our checked-out branchA     in case branchA is not our current branch git checkout branchA    make merge commit but without conflicts     the contents of  ours  will be discarded later git merge -s ours branchB        make temporary branch to merged commit git branch branchTEMP             get contents of working tree and index to the one of branchB git reset --hard branchB    reset to our merged commit but    keep contents of working tree and index git reset --soft branchTEMP    change the contents of the merged commit   with the contents of branchB git commit --amend    get rid off our temporary branch git branch -D branchTEMP    verify that the merge commit contains only contents of branchB git diff HEAD branchB   To automate it you can wrap it into a script using branchA and branchB as arguments   This solution preserves the first and second parent of the merge commit  just as you would expect of git merge -s theirs branchB

User · Answer

Add the -X option to theirs  For example   git checkout branchA git merge -X theirs branchB   Everything will merge in the desired way   The only thing I ve seen cause problems is if files were deleted from branchB  They show up as conflicts if something other than git did the removal   The fix is easy  Just run git rm with the name of any files that were deleted   git rm  DELETED-FILE-NAME    After that  the -X theirs should work as expected    Of course  doing the actual removal with the git rm command will prevent the conflict from happening in the first place     Note  A longer form option also exists    To use it  replace   -X theirs   with   --strategy-option theirs

User · Answer

This will merge your newBranch in existing baseBranch  git checkout  lt baseBranch gt     this will checkout baseBranch git merge -s ours  lt newBranch gt     this will simple merge newBranch in baseBranch git rm -rf      this will remove all non references files from baseBranch  deleted in newBranch  git checkout newBranch --     this will replace all conflicted files in baseBranch

User · Answer

I solved my problem using  git checkout -m old git checkout -b new B git merge -s ours old

User · Answer

When merging topic branch  quot B quot  in  quot A quot  using git merge  I get some conflicts  I  gt know all the conflicts can be solved using the version in  quot B quot   I am aware of git merge -s ours  But what I want is something like git merge  gt -s their   I m assuming that you created a branch off of master and now want to merge back into master  overriding any of the old stuff in master  That s exactly what I wanted to do when I came across this post  Do exactly what it is you want to do  Except merge the one branch into the other first  I just did this  and it worked great  git checkout Branch git merge master -s ours  Then  checkout master and merge your branch in it  it will go smoothly now   git checkout master git merge Branch

User · Answer

I solved my problem using  git checkout -m old git checkout -b new B git merge -s ours old

User · Answer

A simple and intuitive  in my opinion  two-step way of doing it is  git checkout branchB   git commit -m  Picked up the content from branchB    followed by  git merge -s ours branchB    which marks the two branches as merged   The only disadvantage is that it does not remove files which have been deleted in branchB from your current branch  A simple diff between the two branches afterwards will show if there are any such files   This approach also makes it clear from the revision log afterwards what was done - and what was intended

User · Answer

Older versions of git allowed you to use the  theirs  merge strategy   git pull --strategy theirs remote branch   But this has since been removed  as explained in this message by Junio Hamano  the Git maintainer    As noted in the link  instead you would do this   git fetch origin git reset --hard origin   Beware  though  that this is different than an actual merge   Your solution is probably the option you re really looking for

[git] Is there a "theirs" version of "git merge -s ours"?

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