Using Git's rerere feature to escape recurring conflict hell

4 comments

• dools 4 minutes ago

  I never get conflicts during a merge because I only ever merge in one direction. I get all my conflicts on branches because I rebase before merging. I started doing this years and years ago because I kept coming across these mysterious silent regressions with my team. I searched something like "git merge silent regressions" and came across this stackoverflow answer:

  https://stackoverflow.com/a/28510260

  That completely fixed the problem. Now I only ever get conflicts on my feature branches. The rule is always: rebase away from main, and merge towards main. All conflicts are then on your branches, never on main, and always from rebase, never from merge. Then I set the pull behaviour to rebase, too.

  I've never had a silent regression since, and never had a problematic conflict scenario.

  I did recently learn about ORIG_HEAD though which was very cool, because I had accidentally rebased to main instead of to a dev branch from which I had created a bunch of worktrees, then when I merged back to the dev branch all hell broke loose, and I learned that I could revert a merge by checking out ORIG_HEAD:

  https://icinga.com/blog/undo-git-reset-hard/

• 0123456789ABCDE an hour ago

    #~/.config/git/config
    [rerere]
        enabled = true
        autoUpdate = true
  

  while you're editing git config, consider these:

      [pull]
        rebase = true
  
    [rebase]
        autoSquash = true
        autoStash = true
  
    [merge]
        # zdiff3 adds original text markers and removes matching lines from conflict regions
        # https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-mergeconflictStyle
        conflictStyle = zdiff3
        autoStash = true
  
    [push]
        autoSetupRemote = true
        default = simple
  
    [init]
        defaultBranch = main

• davidelettieri 31 minutes ago

  I'm using these options https://blog.gitbutler.com/how-git-core-devs-configure-git and I'm happy with it

• cautiouscat an hour ago

  Every time I think I am adept in git, something like this is shown to me. I really should read into it more lol.