git rerere to remember half-merged progress - valid use?

git rerere to remember half-merged progress - valid use?

[Ilya Kantor]

Hi,

Let's say I'm merging a branch with many conflicts.
I resolved some of them, but then can't proceed or need to switch elsewhere.

Will it be a good practice to call `git rerere` to remember resolved
conflicts, so that in the future
when I re-merge, I get my half-done merge back?

I couldn't find such use of rerere in the internet.

How can I save the merge/restore progress otherwise?

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Best Regards,
Ilya Kantor

Re: git rerere to remember half-merged progress - valid use?

[Junio C Hamano]

Ilya Kantor <iliakan@gmail.com> writes:

> Let's say I'm merging a branch with many conflicts.
> I resolved some of them, but then can't proceed or need to switch elsewhere.
>
> Will it be a good practice to call `git rerere` to remember resolved
> conflicts, so that in the future
> when I re-merge, I get my half-done merge back?

As many of real world issues, the answer is "it depends".  

If you are absolutely sure about what you have resolved so far, then
recording the resolutions for files that you have finished while
there are still other files with conflicts to be resolved before
switching away to another task is a very sensible thing to do.

On the other hand, recording resolutions you are not sure about
means more work for you when you come back and attempt the merge
again, as you would need to check resolutions of which files need
to be nuked and redone (using "checkout -m" and "rerere forget").

My personal strategy is to avoid abandoning conflict resolution in
the middle in the first place ;-), but in many cases I can be quite
confident that I resolved conflicts in a file correctly without
looking at conflicts in other files, so I do not think it is a bad
practice to record resolution of files you resolved so far by
calling "rerere" manually.