While dealing with Jakub's gitweb changes, I found that merge we use _is_ very stupid. Perhaps it is not a surprise... My "next" was at 688a750, and "master" was at b63fafd. I had already merged gitweb changes from Luben to "master" at this point, and "next" was in sync with "master" with respect to gitweb/, i.e. this gave empty: $ git diff master next gitweb/ Jakub's gitweb changes were stored in jn/web branch which contained 16 patches on top of "master". However, pulling "jn/web" (594e212) into "next" using resolve strategy produced interesting conflicts. Essentially, it said that some changes done by Luben (which has already merged to "master" and precedes what Jakub did in "jn/web") conflict with what "jn/web" does, which is quite bogus. This merge has three merge-bases, but $ git log master..next -- gitweb/ shows only two merges, and that is not so surprising given that at this point gitweb/ files are identical between master and next. More interestingly, if I merge "master" to "next" first and then merge "jn/web" on top of the result, the resolve strategy does the right thing. This is understandable -- by merging "master" into "next", merge base between "next" and "jn/web" becomes "master" and nothing else. Using recursive strategy resolved this merge correctly, taking gitweb/ files from "jn/web" branch. By the way, the "recur" strategy in "next" produces the correct result, but it produces a funny error in the middle (that is why Johannes is CC'ed). error: Could not read 0100000000000000000000000000000000000000 : gitster; git merge -s recur 'test merge' next jn/web Merging next with 594e212bc849039a204deef1d16c2eddcc451532 Merging: 688a75071490101dbc660e3304aafb7a13e28807 Merge branch '__/setup-n-mv' into next 594e212bc849039a204deef1d16c2eddcc451532 gitweb: Ref refactoring - use git_get_referencing for marking tagged/head commits found 3 common ancestor(s): 7061cf0f205e86613c3a3306fdfedf2a5dcc8a65 Merge branch 'lt/setup' into __/setup-n-mv acb0f6f33760b43c1fc9617a45346ab3738f021a gitweb.cgi: git_blame2: slight optimization reading the blame lines 2d023581c9a0ae5efdebfd0084d54d09669a25d5 Set datarootdir in config.mak.in Merging: 7061cf0f205e86613c3a3306fdfedf2a5dcc8a65 Merge branch 'lt/setup' into __/setup-n-mv acb0f6f33760b43c1fc9617a45346ab3738f021a gitweb.cgi: git_blame2: slight optimization reading the blame lines found 1 common ancestor(s): 634331061599a82968daddae2d2c0896b6137d4c gitweb.cgi: Centralize printing of the page path Auto-merging gitweb/gitweb.cgi Merging: virtual merged tree 2d023581c9a0ae5efdebfd0084d54d09669a25d5 Set datarootdir in config.mak.in error: Could not read 0100000000000000000000000000000000000000 found 1 common ancestor(s): 7b8cf0cf2973cc8df3bdd36b9b36542b1f04d70a Rename man1 and man7 variables to man1dir and man7dir Auto-merging .gitignore Auto-merging INSTALL Auto-merging Makefile Auto-merging Makefile Merge made by recur. Documentation/git-tar-tree.txt | 5 Makefile | 3 git.c | 76 ++--- gitweb/gitweb.cgi | 609 +++++++++++++++++----------------------- setup.c | 4 5 files changed, 300 insertions(+), 397 deletions(-) - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html