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Comments on Why is git merge from rather than to?

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Why is git merge from rather than to?

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Why does git merge take the source branch rather than the destination branch as a parameter?

The most common merge case by far for me is "Okay, this branch looks good, let's merge it into branch X", where X is often something like master.

Normally, if you're merging, you would expect that some new commits have arrived on the branch recently. If these came from git commit, then obviously you would have the source branch checked out already, which necessitates a clumsy checkout and merge. If these came from git fetch, then you would likewise want to checkout the source branch and see the changes first.

I struggle to think of any use cases for merging from. Why was the merge command designed this way?

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2 comment threads

Workaround (2 comments)
Educated guess (1 comment)
Workaround
Karl Knechtel‭ wrote about 1 year ago · edited about 1 year ago

If the way it works inconveniences you, it shouldn't be hard to make a simple wrapper - checkout a target branch, run a normal merge command, then checkout the original branch again. Since 2.22, the current branch name can be found with git branch --show-current, so that could be interpolated with backticks in a shell command, to save the original branch name for returning to it afterward.

matthewsnyder‭ wrote about 1 year ago

Indeed! I might as well share the gmto script I've been using:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
#
# Checkout to the specified branch and merge the current one into it
# with a merge commit. Usage:
#
#   gmto <target-branch>
#
# Intended for a workflow like:
# 1. Develop feature in branch my-feature
# 2. When done, do gmto master
#
# This will checkout master and merge my-feature into it with a
# commit message.

set -e

# Figure out current branch
BRANCH=$(git branch --show-current)

# Checkout target branch
git checkout "$1"

# Merge
git merge --no-ff -e "$BRANCH"