Hi- I've been investigating the cases where merge is allowed to proceed when there are staged changes in the index or unstaged files in the working directory. There are cases where I find the behavior surprising and I hope I can get clarification. There are also two cases that I will report as bugs, where it appears that the unstaged file contents are deleted. For these cases below, please consider the contents of a single path. In the tables below, we will show the contents of a file across each input and output of the merge - consider that we're merging a single file in some branch "theirs" into the current branch "ours" and that these two branches have a common ancestor "anc". The state of that file in our index and workdir are represented by "idx" and "wd", respectively. Unless otherwise noted, these cases are true for both git-merge-resolve and git-merge-recursive. For completeness and illustration purposes, I'll included the cases where there are no changes staged or unstaged. These succeed, as expected: input result anc ours theirs idx wd merge result idx wd 1 A A B A A take B B B 2 A B A B B take A A A Merge is also expected to proceed if the contents of our branch are the merge result, and there are unstaged changes for that file in the workdir. In this case, the file remains unstaged: input result anc ours theirs idx wd merge result idx wd 3 A B A B C take B B C What was surprising to me was that my merge can proceed if I stage a change that is identical to the merge result. That is, if my merge result would be to take the contents from "theirs", then my merge can proceed if I've already staged the same contents: input result anc ours theirs idx wd merge result idx wd 4 A A B B B take B B B 5 A A B B C take B B C This seems unexpected - is there a use-case that this enables or is this accidental? Another surprising result was that if I have deleted a file (and staged the deletion or not) then the merge will proceed and the file in question will be recreated. Consider "X" to be a missing file: input result anc ours theirs idx wd merge result idx wd 6 A A B A X take B B B 7 A A B X X take B B B I wouldn't have expected a file I deleted to be recreated with the other branch's contents. Is this behavior also intentional? Finally, there are cases when you have staged a deletion of the file and you have unstaged changes in your workdir where the merge will silently delete the unstaged data. If there is a conflict, the xdiff output will overwrite the unstaged file: input result anc ours theirs idx wd merge result idx wd 8 A B C X D conflict X diff3_file And similarly, while git-merge-recursive (only) will also remove my untracked file when there are no changes in our branch but the file was deleted in their branch: input result anc ours theirs idx wd merge result idx wd 9 A A X X B delete file X X I trust the last two cases, where data is lost, are bugs to report, but could I get clarification on the other situations? Thanks- -ed -- 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