git merge: Removing files I want to keep!

Question

How can you merge two branches in git, retaining necessary files from a branch?

When merging two branches, if a file was deleted in one branch and not in another, the file is ultimately deleted.

For example:

• A file exists in master when you make a new branch
• you remove the file from master since we don't need it (yet)
• you make changes in the branch to add a feature, which relies on the file existing
• you make bug fixes in master (cannot be discarded)
• you merge some day, and the file is gone!

---

How to Reproduce:

1. Create a git repo with one file.

   git init
   echo "test" > test.txt
   git add .
   git commit -m "initial commit"
   

2. Create a branch

   git branch branchA
   

3. Delete the file in master

   git rm test.txt
   git commit -m "removed file from master"
   

4. Make ANY changes in branchA that don't touch the deleted file (it has to be unchanged to avoid Conflict)

   git checkout branchA
   touch something.txt
   git add .
   git commit -m "some branch changes"
   

From here, any way I've found to merge these two branches, the test.txt file is deleted. Assuming we were relying on the file for branchA, this is a big problem.

---

Failing examples:

Merge 1

git checkout branchA
git merge master
ls test.txt

Merge 2

git checkout master
git merge branchA
ls test.txt

Rebase 1

git checkout branchA
git rebase master
ls test.txt

Answer 1

This is an interesting issue. Because you deleted the file after BranchA was created, and then are merging master into BranchA, I'm not sure how Git would be able to realize there is a conflict.

After the bad merge you can undo, and then re-merge, but add back the file:

git checkout HEAD@{1} .
git merge --no-commit master
git checkout master test.txt
git add test.txt
git commit

Answer 2

Casey's example didn't work for my case - I couldn't checkout test.txt from master, because it was no longer in that branch:

$ git checkout master test.txt
error: pathspec 'test.txt' did not match any file(s) known to git.

Happily I could pull the file out of branchA's own HEAD:

$ git checkout branchA
$ git merge --no-commit master
$ git checkout HEAD test.txt
$ git add test.txt
$ git commit