Brian L. Troutwine <goofyheadedpunk <at> gmail.com> writes: > > I've got two branches, one which I commit to quite frequently and another only > periodically, call them inward and outward. Inward is where I do my work, > outward tracks an SVN repository. I'd like to merge inward to outward without > committing the merge so that I may provide a commit message appropriate for > checking in to the SVN repo. > > `git merge --no-commit inward' from branch outward, I thought, should do it. > Performing a `git status' and a `git log' directly afterward seem to indicate > that the merge was committed. `git commit' insists the branch is now up to > date. > If you want the "whole" set of changes from inward to appear in outward as a /single/ commit with an appropriate commit message, probably you want to use also the --squash option of git merge. Otherwise, git will preserve the "structuring" of the history in many commits. This means that: - if outward does not need any real merge (because it only needs to be advanced to a newer status and not to join some changes of its own with changes from inward), git merge will make a "fast-forward". In other words, you will see outward becoming up to date without the need of any merge-commit at all. BTW that is why --no-commit appears to have no effect in this case: there wouldn't be any merge commit in any case. - if outward needs a real merge, then git merge will set up everything up to the point of making the merge commit. Then, depending on the presence of the --no-commit option it will or will not make the actual commit. > Am I going about this the wrong way? What does --no-commit mean, if I am? > > (Also, I asked this on #git earlier. If anyone happens to idle there, pardon > me for re-posting this so quickly. I've got terrible lag this morning, enough > to time out frequently.) - 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