What is the precise meaning of ours and theirs in git

Question

This might sound like too basic of a question  but I have searched for answers and I am more confused now than before   What does  ours  and  theirs  mean in git when merging my branch into my other branch  Both branches are  ours     In a merge conflict is  ours  always the upper of the two versions displayed    Does  ours  always refer to the branch that HEAD was pointing to when the merge began  If so then why not use a clear possessive reference like  current branch s  instead of using a possessive pronoun like  ours  that is referentially ambiguous  since both branches are technically ours     Or just use the branch name  instead of saying  ours  just say  local master s  or such    The most confusing part to me is if I specify in a specific branch s  gitattributes file  Lets say in test branch I have the following  gitattributes file   config xml merge ours   Now I checkout and point HEAD to master then merge in test  Since master is ours  and test s  gitattributes is not checked out  will it even have an effect  If it does have an effect  since master is now  ours   then what will happen

User · Answer

The  ours  in Git is referring to the original working branch which has authoritative canonical part of git history   The  theirs  refers to the version that holds the work in order to be rebased  changes to be replayed onto the current branch    This may appear to be swapped to people who are not aware that doing rebasing  e g  git rebase  is actually taking your work on hold  which is theirs  in order to replay onto the canonical main history which is ours  because we re rebasing our changes as third-party work   The documentation for git-checkout was further clarified in Git   2 5 1 as per f303016 commit      --ours   --theirs      When checking out paths from the index  check out stage  2           ours   or  3   theirs   for unmerged paths       Note that during git rebase and git pull --rebase   ours  and  theirs  may appear swapped  --ours gives the version from the branch the changes are rebased onto  while --theirs gives the version from the branch that holds your work that is being rebased       This is because rebase is used in a workflow that treats the history at the remote as the shared canonical one  and treats the work done on the branch you are rebasing as the third-party work to be integrated  and you are temporarily assuming the role of the keeper of the canonical history during the rebase   As the keeper of the canonical history  you need to view the history from the remote as ours  i e   our shared canonical history    while what you did on your side branch as theirs  i e   one contributor s work on top of it      For git-merge it s explain in the following way      ours      This option forces conflicting hunks to be auto-resolved cleanly by favoring our version  Changes from the other tree that do not conflict with our side are reflected to the merge result  For a binary file  the entire contents are taken from our side       This should not be confused with the ours merge strategy  which does not even look at what the other tree contains at all  It discards everything the other tree did  declaring our history contains all that happened in it       theirs      This is the opposite of ours    Further more  here is explained how to use them      The merge mechanism  git merge and git pull commands  allows the backend merge strategies to be chosen with -s option  Some strategies can also take their own options  which can be passed by giving -X lt option gt  arguments to git merge and or git pull      So sometimes it can be confusing  for example    git pull origin master where  -Xours is our local  -Xtheirs is theirs  remote  branch git pull origin master -r where -Xours is theirs  remote   -Xtheirs is ours   So the 2nd example is opposite to the 1st one  because we re rebasing our branch on top of the remote one  so our starting point is remote one  and our changes are treated as external   Similar for git merge strategies  -X ours and -X theirs

User · Answer

I know this has been answered  but this issue confused me so many times I ve put up a small reference website to help me remember  https   nitaym github io ourstheirs   Here are the basics   Merges     git checkout master    git merge feature   If you want to select the version in master     git checkout --ours codefile js   If you want to select the version in feature     git checkout --theirs codefile js   Rebases     git checkout feature    git rebase master    If you want to select the version in master     git checkout --ours codefile js   If you want to select the version in feature     git checkout --theirs codefile js    This is for complete files  of course

User · Answer

I ll post my memo here  because I have to come back here again and again  SCENARIO 1  Normal developer  You are developer who can t merge to master and have to play with feature branches only  Case 1  master is a king  You want to refresh your feature branch    rebase to master   because master contains new updates of dependencies and you want to overwrite your modest changes  git checkout master git pull  git checkout feature git rebase -X ours master  Case 2  you are a king  You want to rebase your feature branch to master changes  But you did more than your colleagues had and want to use your own changes in a priority  git checkout master git pull  git checkout feature git rebase -X theirs master  IMPORTANT  As you can see normal developers should prefer rebase and repeat it every morning like exercises coffee  SCENARIO 2  Merging-sensei  You are a team-lead and want to merge other branches and push a merged result directly to a master  master is a branch you will change  Case 1  master is a king You want to merge third-party branch  but master is a priority  feature is a branch that your senior did  git checkout feature git pull  git checkout master git merge -X ours feature  Case 2  new changes is a king When your senior developer released a cool feature and you want to overwrite the old s  t in the master branch  git checkout feature git pull  git checkout master git merge -X theirs feature  REMEMBER  To remember in a midnight which one to choose  master is ours ALWAYS  And theirs is a feature that theirs have done

User · Answer

Ours  This is the branch you are currently on  Theirs  This is the other branch that is used in your action    So if you are on branch release 2 5 and you merge branch feature new-buttons into it  then the content as found in release 2 5 is what ours refers to and the content as found on feature new-buttons is what theirs refers to  During a merge action this is pretty straight forward   The only problem most people fall for is the rebase case  If you do a re-base instead of a normal merge  the roles are swapped  How s that  Well  that s caused solely by the way rebasing works   Think of rebase to work like that    All commits you have done since your last pull are moved to a branch of their own  let s name it BranchX  You checkout the head of your current branch  discarding any local   changes you had but that way retrieving all changes others have pushed for that branch  Now every commit on BranchX is cherry-picked in order old to new to your current branch  BranchX is deleted again and thus won t ever show up in any history    Of course  that s not really what is going on but it s a nice mind model for me  And if you look at 2 and 3  you will understand why the roles are swapped now   As of 2  your current branch is now the branch from the server without any of your changes  so this is ours  the branch you are on   The changes you made are now on a different branch that is not your current one  BranchX  and thus these changes  despite being the changes you made  are theirs  the other branch used in your action    That means if you merge and you want your changes to always win  you d tell git to always choose  ours  but if you rebase and you want all your changes to always win  you tell git to always choose  theirs

User · Answer

I know it doesn t explain the meaning but I ve made myself a little image  as reference to remind which one to use     Hope it helps   PS - Give a check also to the link in Nitay s answer

User · Answer

Just to clarify -- as noted above when rebasing the sense is reversed  so if you see  lt  lt  lt  lt  lt  lt  lt  HEAD         foo   12                  foo   22   gt  gt  gt  gt  gt  gt  gt   your commit message   Resolve using  mine   - gt  foo   12 Resolve using  theirs  - gt  foo   22

User · Answer

I suspect you re confused here because it s fundamentally confusing   To make things worse  the whole ours theirs stuff switches roles  becomes backwards  when you are doing a rebase   Ultimately  during a git merge  the  ours  branch refers to the branch you re merging into   git checkout merge-into-ours   and the  theirs  branch refers to the  single  branch you re merging   git merge from-theirs   and here  ours  and  theirs  makes some sense  as even though  theirs  is probably yours anyway   theirs  is not the one you were on when you ran git merge   While using the actual branch name might be pretty cool  it falls apart in more complex cases   For instance  instead of the above  you might do   git checkout ours git merge 1234567   where you re merging by raw commit-ID   Worse  you can even do this   git checkout 7777777      detach HEAD git merge 1234567         do a test merge   in which case there are no branch names involved   I think it s little help here  but in fact  in gitrevisions syntax  you can refer to an individual path in the index by number  during a conflicted merge  git show  1 README git show  2 README git show  3 README   Stage  1 is the common ancestor of the files  stage  2 is the target-branch version  and stage  3 is the version you are merging from     The reason the  ours  and  theirs  notions get swapped around during rebase is that rebase works by doing a series of cherry-picks  into an anonymous branch  detached HEAD mode    The target branch is the anonymous branch  and the merge-from branch is your original  pre-rebase  branch  so  --ours  means the anonymous one rebase is building while  --theirs  means  our branch being rebased      As for the gitattributes entry  it could have an effect   ours  really means  use stage  2  internally   But as you note  it s not actually in place at the time  so it should not have an effect here     well  not unless you copy it into the work tree before you start   Also  by the way  this applies to all uses of ours and theirs  but some are on a whole file level  -s ours for a merge strategy  git checkout --ours during a merge conflict  and some are on a piece-by-piece basis  -X ours or -X theirs during a -s recursive merge    Which probably does not help with any of the confusion   I ve never come up with a better name for these  though   And  see VonC s answer to another question  where git mergetool introduces yet more names for these  calling them  local  and  remote

User · Answer

There is no precise meaning  precisely because these terms mean the opposite things depending on whether you are merging or rebasing  THE natural way of thinking about two branches is  quot my work quot  and  quot someone else s work quot   The choice of terminology that obscures this classification is absolutely THE worst design choice in git  It must have been inspired by accounting s  quot credit quot  and  quot debit quot  or  quot assets quot  and  quot liabilities quot  - same headache

User · Answer

From git checkout s usage     -2  --ours            checkout our version for unmerged files -3  --theirs          checkout their version for unmerged files -m  --merge           perform a 3-way merge with the new branch   When resolving merge conflicts  you can do git checkout --theirs some file  and git checkout --ours some file to reset the file to the current version and the incoming versions respectively    If you ve done git checkout --ours some file or git checkout --theirs some file and would like to reset the file to the 3-way merge version of the file  you can do git checkout --merge some file

[git] What is the precise meaning of "ours" and "theirs" in git?

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