--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
-a
Run merge against all files in the index that need merging.
-o
Instead of stopping at the first failed merge, do all of them
in one shot - continue with merging even when previous merges
returned errors, and only return the error code after all the
merges.
-q
Do not complain about a failed merge program (a merge program
failure usually indicates conflicts during the merge). This
is for porcelains which might want to emit custom messages.
If git merge-index is called with multiple <file>s (or -a) then
it processes them in turn only stopping if merge returns a
non-zero exit code.
Typically this is run with a script calling Git's imitation of
the merge command from the RCS package.
A sample script called git merge-one-file is included in the
distribution.
ALERT ALERT ALERT! The Git "merge object order" is different from
the RCS merge program merge object order. In the above ordering,
the original is first. But the argument order to the 3-way merge
program merge is to have the original in the middle. Don't ask me
why.
Examples:
torvalds@ppc970:~/merge-test> git merge-index cat MM
This is MM from the original tree. # original
This is modified MM in the branch A. # merge1
This is modified MM in the branch B. # merge2
This is modified MM in the branch B. # current contents
or
torvalds@ppc970:~/merge-test> git merge-index cat AA MM
cat: : No such file or directory
This is added AA in the branch A.
This is added AA in the branch B.
This is added AA in the branch B.
fatal: merge program failed
where the latter example shows how git merge-index will stop
trying to merge once anything has returned an error (i.e., cat
returned an error for the AA file, because it didn't exist in the
original, and thus git merge-index didn't even try to merge the
MM thing).