On Mon, 13 Dec 2010, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > hm -- read-tree sounded like yet another unknown to me feature of GIT I > > was trying desperately to discover ;) unfortunately it doesn't produce a merge > > for me > Didn't I already say it makes sense only with --no-commit? IOW to shape > the tree. rright -- in my case --no-commit so I could remove the content before committing. > And in your use case I do not think you would even want to have a merge. > Even if you run "git rm" to remove non-free stuff from the merge result, > if you merged the history of 0.2 that contains non-free stuff you are not > allowed to distribute (forbidden either by upstream or self-imposed dfsg, > the reason does not matter), people who gets the merge commit can follow > its second parent to grab the non-free stuff, no? I see your point better now -- so it is yet another dimension of "the feature". as for non-free -- I probably should have been more precise -- non-DFSG (debian free software guidelines)-free ;) i.e.: * free compiled,rendered materials, often binary blobs, without sources (e.g. .dll's, pdfs etc) * material under free but not DFSG-free licenses, etc * if upstream repository already provides that 'non-free' material it would not be much of my misdemeanor to keep them as well buried in the repository history. What I care is to have a cleaned branch from which I could git archive, and also which I could inspect in regards to changes between releases without visually filtering all changes in non-sources (e.g. those binary blobs) or irrelevant content. if ever legal situation causes upstream to rewrite history to remove them -- I will have to do that as well anyways :-/ Having an actual merge would be useful for making the explicit "bridge" from upstream branch, thus '--no-commit -s theirs' with consecutive cleaning before commit looks the way to go IMHO. But I see now that I could possibly use read-tree at times if a real necessity comes to prune non-distributable content, and then obviously I do not want to drag upstream's illegal stuff along. -- Yaroslav O. Halchenko Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755 Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834 Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419 WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik -- To unsubscribe from this list: 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