Make remote branch take precedence during a merge conflict

Question

I have two branches, current and master. current is dozens of commits ahead of master so I think it's time to merge.

I change to master

git checkout master

I attempt to merge with current

get merge current

I get about 20 conflicts of this nature:

CONFLICT (rename/add) <remote>
CONFLICT (rename/add) <remote>

First question, how do I make the remote branch, current take precedence here? I'm working my way through all the conflicts with git mergetool -t meld and I'm clicking away, selecting all the remote changes over the local changes.

So how can I do this with one command? I want remote to take presence.

Also, why have these conflicts occurred? I would have thought it obvious that the latest branch would contain the changes we want to keep?

Answer 1

When you are merging you can specify a strategy to use for automatically resolving some conflicts (the comments contain a link to the man page for this http://git-scm.com/docs/git-merge). You would use the recursive strategy with the option of theirs. This will resolve all conflicts by using the version in the branch that is being merged in. If you were merging master into your branch, then it would be ours.

The command would end up being:

git merge -s recursive -Xtheirs current

This will resolve ALL conflicts with what is on the branch being merged in.

Before you commit your merge if there are conflicts, I would check the diff with git diff --staged carefully. And run any tests that you have so that you are sure that the conflict resolution didn't overwrite changes on master that you actually wanted.