On 2024-03-22 10:56, Konstantin Khomoutov wrote:
On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 12:39:36PM +0300, Sergey Organov wrote:
I'd like to merge only certain files, or folders, from another
branch. What command or options should I be looking at to get
this done?
If you are using the verb "merge" in the way Git uses, then there is
*no* option to do so and that is very much deliberate, as allowing
such a operation will break your history.
No, it won't break history. The merge commit *content* does not break
*history* in any way. Path-limiting makes perfect sense when one is
about to create merge commit content and knows in advance the exact
set
of paths the changes from which are to be included (or ignored).
This reminded me of the "disaster no. 2" in the rant, arguably famous
at the
time [1], in particular:
| One user of Tortoise Git would do a pull, have a merge conflict,
resolve the
| merge conflict, and then look carefully at his list of files to be
committed
| back when he was committing the results. There were lots of files
there, and
| he knew that the merge conflict only involved a couple of files. For
his
| commit, he unchecked all the other files changes that he was not
involved
| in, committed the results and pushed the commit.
My understanding is that the OP actually wanted to create a similar
situation
consciously. It's quite possible that they intend to never merge the
results
back into "the main line" but anyway.
The point is, the feature you're advocating is bound to be abused
exactly
through this "this is my stuff, and there is the stuff I do not care
about"
attitude.
Having said that, I do not oppose these features (not that my opinion
should
have any weight; I'm just making things clear) as in the end the only
workable
solution to have decent quality of a project's content is "gatekeeping"
the
changes by the review process.
1. https://randyfay.com/content/avoiding-git-disasters-gory-story
Here's a similar story... A while back, when I used Subversion heavily,
I (ab)used a lot its ability to perform partial updates to the working
copy,
i.e. to run "svn update <path>". It can be highly useful if used _VERY_
carefully, but it's also quite dangerous. Like a chainsaw.
