Merge text files stored in Git LFS using the default Git merge machinery, or a custom merge driver if specified. Note that this, in general, does not support partial renames or copies because Git does not support them in this case.
This program is intended to be invoked automatically by Git and not by users manually. See [_configuration] for details on the configuration required for that.
--ancestor <path>
-
Specify the file containing the ancestor revision.
--current <path>
-
Specify the file containing the current revision.
--marker-size <num>
-
Specify the conflict marker size as an integer.
--other <path>
-
Specify the file containing the other revision.
--program <program>
-
Specify a command, which is passed to the shell after substitution, that performs the actual merge. If this is not specified,
git merge-file
is invoked with appropriate arguments to perform the merge of the file.See [_configuration] for the sequences which are substituted here.
Git allows the use of a custom merge driver for files based on the
merge
attribute set in .gitattributes
. By default, when using
git lfs track
, this value is set to lfs
.
Because Git LFS can be used to store both text and binary files and it
isn’t always clear which behavior should be used, Git LFS does not
enable this merge driver by default. However, if you know that some or
all of your files are text files, then you can set the merge
attribute
for those files to lfs-text
and use git config
to set the merge
driver like so:
$ git config merge.lfs-text.driver 'git lfs merge-driver --ancestor %O --current %A --other %B --marker-size %L --output %A'
This tells Git to invoke the custom Git LFS merge driver, which in turn
uses Git’s merge machinery, to merge files where the merge
attribute
is set to lfs-text
. Note that lfs-text
here is an example and any
syntactically valid value can be used.
If you are using a special type of file that needs rules different from
Git’s standard merge machinery, you can also specify the --program
option, which is passed to sh
after substituting its own
percent-encoded escapes:
-
%A
: the current version -
%B
: the other version -
%D
: the destination version -
%O
: the ancestor version -
%L
: the conflict marker size
Note that the percent sign must typically be doubled to prevent Git from substituting its own values here. Therefore, specifying the default behavior explicitly looks like this:
$ git config merge.lfs-text.driver \
'git lfs merge-driver --ancestor %O --current %A --other %B --marker-size %L --output %A --program '\''git merge-file --stdout --marker-size=%%L %%A %%O %%B >%%D'\'''
The exit status from the custom command should be zero on success or non-zero on conflicts or other failure.
Note that if no merge driver is specified for the value of the merge
attribute (as is the case by default with merge=lfs
), then the default
Git merge strategy is used. For LFS files, this means that Git will try
to merge the pointer files, which usually is not useful.