git: Solve merge conflicts without performing a merge

Question

I just want to know, if there is any way, to resolve merge commits, of two git branches, without actually merging them.

Assuming, I have a branch "featureMy"; my colleague created another branch "featureHis". Both branches are created on "master" branch.

My colleague then created a merge request for his branch "featureHis" into master. When I then create my merge request of "featureMy" into master, I want to ensure, that it will not conflicts with master after "featureHis" is merged.

Usually, I will merge "featureHis" into "featureMy" before. However, this is not that satisfying, because I have a additional merge commit as "noise" and my merge request will contain changes from "featureHis".

Is there a way, so that I can solve the merge conflicts, without creating a merge commit?

Kind regards

Answer 1

One standard way to avoid having merge commits is to use rebasing in place of merging. Consider the following scenario:

master:     A
featureMy:  A -- B
featureHis: A -- C

Assuming that only these two branches are extant from master , then one of you will merge with master first. Let's say it is your colleague who gets there first. Then the diagram would look like this:

master:     A -- C
featureMy:  A -- B
featureHis: A -- C

Your colleague's commit is now in the master branch. Now if you use a merge-based workflow, you would first merge master into your branch, and then you merge your branch back into master . This would result in:

master:     A -- C -- E
featureMy:  A -- B -- D
featureHis: A -- C

Now both your branch and the master branch have ugly merge commits in them. However, if you had rebased your branch on master , you would be left with:

master:     A -- C
featureMy:  A -- C -- B'    (B' indicates that this a new commit, not B)
featureHis: A -- C

Now your branch featureMy is actually ahead of the master branch. You can simply push your commit in, directly on top of master , with no conflicts. This results in the following diagram:

master:     A -- C -- B'
featureMy:  A -- C -- B'
featureHis: A -- C

Notice that there are no merge commits anywhere. In fact, both your featureMy branch and master have identical linear histories.

Long live git rebase .

Answer 2

If your merge conflicts can be solved by using one version of a file entirely, here's a solution.

Say you want to merge into a branch called qa and there are conflicts in composer.json and composer.lock . qa contains later versions that you want to use instead of what's in your branch.

git checkout origin/qa -- composer.json composer.lock
git commit -m "fixed merge conflicts without merging"