On Thu, Dec 27 2018, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Right now, merge rules can get selected in .gitattributes, which is > version-controlled. However, there does not appear to be any way to *define* > custom merge rules which is version controlled. > > There are a lot of different files which can benefit from custom merge rules, > especially ones that are in some ways cumulative or version/tree-dependent. > For example, I use this rule to merge version files: > > [merge "version"] > name = Version file merge driver > driver = sort -V -r %O %A %B | head -1 > %A.tmp.1 && mv -f %A.tmp.1 %A > > (Incidentally: the need for an explicit temp file here is frustrating. It > would be better if git could manage the temporary file. Overwriting %A > directly truncates the file too early. See other email.) > > However, I can't even put this in .gitattributes, because doing so would break > any user who *doesn't* have the previous rule defined locally. Even worse, if > this rule needs to change, propagating it to all new users has to be done > manually... never mind if it needs to vary by branch! > > The simplest way to address this would presumably be to let the > repository/working directory contain a .gitconfig file that can contain rules > like that. (Allowing it to be in the repository proper is probably a > requirement for merges to be handled correctly on bare repositories; I'm not > sure how .gitattributes is handled for that.) This would fall under the general umbrella of allowing repos to set configuration, see https://public-inbox.org/git/?q=87zi6eakkt.fsf%40evledraar.gmail.com for some previous discussion.
