git am from branch to master

Question

I'm working together with a college of mine in git. I'm working on a branch, and he's working on the master. I've done some work related to his files on my branch, and I decided to send him a patch file. I created the patch with git format-patch , and sent it to him. when he tries to apply the patch using git am he get's the following message: previous release directory

It's probably because the patch arrived from a different branch.

Is there a way for him to use the patch on the master branch ?

Note: I'm using git am , and not git apply to keep commit-id that is generated for jetty. I still want the commiter to be me on his local repository.

Answer 1

Consider using one of the two solutions when dealing with patches that fails to apply properly :
(article from bugdromer ):

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The simplest way for dealing with it would be to:

• git am --abort ,
• apply the patch manually by patch -p1 < PATCH ,
• resolve the conflict by hand,
• and finally commit with git commit -a .

But in this case you'll have to rewrite the commit message, which is not very nice. There is a more clever way.

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You can find the corresponding patch file stored in .git/rebase-apply , and named " 0001 " (the name of the dir where the patch is stored changed recently, this is tested with 1.7.4.1).
At this point:

• you can use git apply for applying the patch, which is the git equivalent of the patch command ,
• and fix the conflicting files the usual way (you check the .rej files, compare them with the conflicting files and finally add the fixed files to the index):

Example:

$ git apply PATCH --reject
$ edit edit edit
$ git add FIXED_FILES
$ git am --resolved

and you're done!
In other words, since git am didn't change the index, you need to

• git apply --reject the patch (stored in .git/rebase-apply ),
• fix conflicts by hand,
• add the changed files and
• finally tell git that you resolved the trouble.

The advantage in this case is that:

• you don't need to re-edit the commit message,
• and in the case you're applying a set of patches (that is you're using git am PATCHES , where PATCHES is a mailbox), you don't have to git abort and run git am again.

Answer 2

Try the --3way option of git am :

 -3, --3way When the patch does not apply cleanly, fall back on 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally.