Hopefully Final rc before Git 1.7.10

Git 1.7.10-rc3 has been tagged and users are strongly encouraged to download and test it before the final release happens.  The tarballs are found at http://code.google.com/p/git-core/downloads/list and people fetching them using Git can find it in my public repositories.


Among the many improvements in the upcoming release is an update to the git merge command. While this has been received very favorably, it may surprise you when you run it for the first time, and is worth mentioning.


Traditionally, when the git merge command attempted to merge two or more histories, it prepared a canned commit log message based on what is being merged, and recorded the result in a merge commit without any user intervention, if the automatic merge logic successfully computed the resulting tree without conflict. When the automatic logic did not manage to come up with a clean merge result, it gave up, leaving the conflicted state in the index and in the working tree files, and asked the user to resolve them and run the git commit command to record the outcome.

Most merges do cleanly resolve, and this behavior resulted in people making their merges too easily and lightly, even when the reason why the merge was made in the first place  should be explained. Nobody explained why the merge was made in a merge commit, because in order to do so after git merge already made the commit, they have to go back and run git commit --amend to do so.

Recently in a discussion on the Git mailing list, Linus admitted (and I agreed) that this was one of the design mistakes we made early in the history of Git. And in 1.7.10 and later, the git merge command that is run in an interactive session (i.e. both its standard input and its standard output connected to a terminal) will open an editor before creating a commit to record the merge result, to give the user a chance to explain the merge, just like the git commit command the user runs after resolving a conflicted merge already does.


A quick way to update your scripts that shouldn't let its users explain the merges created by them is to set and export an environment variable, like this.

#!/bin/sh

GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT=no
export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT

# whatever your script did originally

...

git merge foo

git merge bar

...

For a more detailed discussion, see these earlier posts.