Hi git devs, I have a repo with two branches where some files are absent in one of the branches. Say the two branches are <allfiles> and <somefiles>. Until now I was using $ git merge -s ours <allfiles> # with <somefiles> checked out to merge commits which touches the absent files. But this clutters up history and is very inconvenient to do sometimes. So when I came across the possibility of using .gitattributes for file specific merge strategies, I tried the following: pattern merge=ours However I get the following conflict message: CONFLICT (rename/delete): org-mode-config.el deleted in HEAD and renamed in 74288bb. Version 74288bb of org-mode-config.el left in tree. This file was deleted from <somefiles> in the past[1] and was renamed in <allfiles> since the last merge. I was expecting this file to be ignored (or in other words, merged with ours) since the .gitattributes file has entries like these: org-mode-config.el merge=ours # new name in allfiles branch lisp/org-mode-settings.el merge=ours # old name deleted in somefiles I also see other new files in <allfiles> which are mentioned in .gitattributes being merged in <somefiles>. $ git status -sb ## somefiles M abbrev_defs A cpp-config.el A email-config.el # <-- this should be ignored A gui-config.el # <-- this should be ignored UU init.el A keybindings.el M lisp/skeletons.el D lisp/text-mode-like-settings.el UA org-mode-config.el # <-- this should be ignored A text-mode-config.el What am I doing wrong here? My git version is 1.7.7.6. Thanks in advance, Footnotes: [1] There has been several successful merges since then. -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free. -- 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