Conflicts while merging - how to tell git to always use newer?

Question

i was just trying to merge two repositories. For some reason, the merging didn't go well and created a lot of conflicts. Most of them are due to the fact that i upadated a component in one version.

So what i would like to do is merge and wherever a conflict pops up, tell git to use the newer version. Otherwise it would take ages to merge this.

Is there a way to do this?

see [git merge -s ours, what about “their”](http://stackoverflow.com/q/173919/11343) — CharlesB, May 11 '12 at 10:07

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 11 '12 at 11:36

2

I'm afraid there's a problem with that "newer" concept: in Git, "tree objects" (which record names, sizes and hashes of blobs they reference) do not contain timestamps of those blobs. Hence there's a logical problem of deciding which of two (or more, for octopus merge) blobs which happen to map to the same filesystem name is newer than the others.

answered May 11 '12 at 11:36

kostix

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You could imagine to lookout the timestamp of the commit this blob or tree belongs to... – CharlesB May 11 '12 at 11:52

Yanflea · Answer 2 · 2012-05-11T11:50:16.593

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Could you not do a

git merge -s ours anotherbranch

?

edited May 11 '12 at 11:50

answered May 11 '12 at 09:50

Yanflea

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hum... reading again your question, I assume it would'nt do the trick because "ours" does not have always the newest stuff, right ? :-/ – Yanflea May 11 '12 at 09:51
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What about isolating the changes concerning the new version of your component in a new dedicated branch, merging it with "ours" option, and finally merging the rest the standard way ? – Yanflea May 11 '12 at 11:45

Conflicts while merging - how to tell git to always use newer?

2 Answers2