Documentation/merge-strategies.txt

   1 MERGE STRATEGIES
   2 ----------------
   3
   4 resolve::
   5         This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch
   6         and another branch you pulled from) using 3-way merge
   7         algorithm.  It tries to carefully detect criss-cross
   8         merge ambiguities and is considered generally safe and
   9         fast.
  10
  11 recursive::
  12         This can only resolve two heads using 3-way merge
  13         algorithm.  When there are more than one common
  14         ancestors that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a
  15         merged tree of the common ancestors and uses that as
  16         the reference tree for the 3-way merge.  This has been
  17         reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without
  18         causing mis-merges by tests done on actual merge commits
  19         taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history.
  20         Additionally this can detect and handle merges involving
  21         renames.  This is the default merge strategy when
  22         pulling or merging one branch.
  23
  24 octopus::
  25         This resolves more than two-head case, but refuses to do
  26         complex merge that needs manual resolution.  It is
  27         primarily meant to be used for bundling topic branch
  28         heads together.  This is the default merge strategy when
  29         pulling or merging more than one branches.
  30
  31 ours::
  32         This resolves any number of heads, but the result of the
  33         merge is always the current branch head.  It is meant to
  34         be used to supersede old development history of side
  35         branches.