When applying a patch is there any way to resolve conflicts?

Question

I am on windows.

For various reasons we have multiple git instances of different svn branches.

Many times I want to fix an issue in repository A, generate a patch, and apply it to repository B. This works fine except if there are conflicts.

When rebasing I just right click the folder and use tortioseGit and select the resolve option. This brings up a nice gui to let me work through my conflicts.

Is there any way to accomplish this with rejected patch chunks?

Here is my current approach to creating/applying the patches

git format-patch master --stdout > c:\\patch\\file.patch
git apply --reject --ignore-space-change --ignore-whitespace c:\\patch\\file.patch

Answer 1

To generate your patch do the following:

git format-patch --stdout first_commit^..last_commit > changes.patch

Now when you are ready to apply the patches:

git am -3 < changes.patch

the -3 will do a three-way merge if there are conflicts. At this point you can do a git mergetool if you want to go to a gui or just manually merge the files using vim (the standard <<<<<<, ||||||, >>>>>> conflict resolution).

Answer 2

If you are frequently running into the same conflict set when applying patches, rebasing or merging then you can use git rerere (reuse recorded resolution) function. This allows you to pre-define how conflicts should be resolved based on how you resolved them in the past. See http://git-scm.com/blog/2010/03/08/rerere.html for details of how this works.

Answer 3

TortoiseGit has a merge feature that can open patch files.

There's a picture of it here.

Answer 4

My approach is:

• Create an "Integration"-Branch where the files are identical
• Apply the patch to this Integration-Branch
• Merge or rebase it to master (don't know if rebase is useful here, because I don't know what will happen when applying further patches)