Re: Stash

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > People said that git merge can fail for another reason (I forget
 > > what), not only because of conflicts.
 > 
 > I'm not aware of any, unless they meant uncommitted changes in the
 > same files that were changed upstream (which is covered on the Wiki
 > under "conflicts").

Assuming enough free disk and memory, etc, a requested merge that does
not terminate normally is always due to conflicts.

If the conflict is between the incoming branch and content committed
to the current branch, then the merge will be started and terminate
with files updated and conflict markers where needed.  In git, unlike
bzr and hg and "CVS update", normal termination of a merge will also
create a commit object and advance the branch's HEAD pointer.

If the conflict is between the incoming branch and uncommitted changes
in the workspace, the requested merge fails git's preconditions and
does not even start.  No files in the workspace are touched, no commit
objects are created, and the HEAD pointer is not moved.

Some people (who I believe are not native speakers) have called both
non-success modes "failure".