user-manual: describe how higher stages are set during a merge

Higher stages store the blobs involved from their side verbatim.  Removal
of uninteresting hunks are done by "diff --cc" upon demand and not stored
in the index.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This commit is contained in:
Junio C Hamano 2008-06-12 14:30:37 -07:00
parent 9501fc8945
commit 4209752da5

View File

@ -1254,16 +1254,15 @@ these three "file stages" represents a different version of the file:
-------------------------------------------------
$ git show :1:file.txt # the file in a common ancestor of both branches
$ git show :2:file.txt # the version from HEAD, but including any
# nonconflicting changes from MERGE_HEAD
$ git show :3:file.txt # the version from MERGE_HEAD, but including any
# nonconflicting changes from HEAD.
$ git show :2:file.txt # the version from HEAD.
$ git show :3:file.txt # the version from MERGE_HEAD.
-------------------------------------------------
Since the stage 2 and stage 3 versions have already been updated with
nonconflicting changes, the only remaining differences between them are
the important ones; thus linkgit:git-diff[1] can use the information in
the index to show only those conflicts.
When you ask linkgit:git-diff[1] to show the conflicts, it runs a
three-way diff between the conflicted merge results in the work tree with
stages 2 and 3 to show only hunks whose contents come from both sides,
mixed (in other words, when a hunk's merge results come only from stage 2,
that part is not conflicting and is not shown. Same for stage 3).
The diff above shows the differences between the working-tree version of
file.txt and the stage 2 and stage 3 versions. So instead of preceding