Earlier I wrote down a list of issues your recent "merge stage" changes have introduced to the rest of the plumbing, with a set of suggested adaptions. I think all of them are cleared now (you have a pile of patches from me in your mailbox).
I do not know what percentage of people on this list are using git without the Cogito part, but I suspect that the number might be quite small. I also suspect, from the description Petr gave us on how the merging in Cogito works, Cogito does not currently use the "read-tree -m O A B" mechanism, and those majority who do not deal with the low level tools themselves would not have to know about the merge issues yet. But I think it is a good time, now things have started to settle down, to summarize how various commands work when they see those "funny" dircache entries created after "read-tree -m O A B" has run. Of course, people working on Cogito needs to know them, once they decide to use the "reed-tree -m O A B" mechanism. * read-tree -m O A B - For description on how this works, the definitive reading is [*R1*]. In short: - unlike ordinary read-tree, "-m" form reads up to three trees and creates paths that are "unmerged". - trivial merges are done by read-tree itself. only conflicting paths will be in unmerged state when read-tree returns. * write-tree - write-tree refuses to give you a tree until all the unmerged paths are resolved. * show-files - "show-files --unmerged" and "show-files --stage" can be used to examine detailed information on unmerged paths. For an unmerged path, instead of recording a single mode/SHA1 pair, the dircache records up to three such pairs; one from tree O in stage 1, A in stage 2, and B in stage 3. This information can be used by the user (or Cogito) to see what should eventually be recorded at the path. * update-cache - An explicit "update-cache [--add] path" or "update-cache [--add] --cacheinfo mode SHA1 path" tells the plumbing that the user (or Cogito) wants to resolve it by storing mode/SHA1 of the given working file or mode SHA1 specified on the command line. The path ceases to be in unmerged state after this happens. Similarly, "update-cache --remove path" resolves the unmerged state and the merge result is not having anything at that path. - "update-cache --refresh", in addition to the "needs update" message people are now familiar with, says "needs merge" for unmerged paths. * show-diff - show-diff on an unmerged path simply says "unmerged" (the plumbing would not know what to diff with what among three stages and the working file). * checkout-cache - "checkout-cache -a" warns about unmerged paths and checks out only the merged paths. - "checkout-cache [-f] path" on an unmerged path says "Unmerged", just like the same command on non-existent path says "not in the cache", and does not touch the working file. I hope the descriptions in this summary is correct enough to be useful to somebody. [Reference] *R1* http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=111363270608902&w=2 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html