Git merge strategy to ignore deleted files

Question

I have special branch (release branch) which is an exact copy of master branch with some files and directories removed. No development is happening on this branch, however i

Answer 1

There's probably a better way to do this, but I solved a similar problem by doing the merge (with the default merge strategy) and then running

git status | grep 'deleted by us' | awk '{print $4}' | xargs git rm

After this, you should resolve other conflicts as normal and then commit.

This just deletes all files that had been deleted on the current branch, which I think is what you want.

Answer 2

git merge master
git status --porcelain | awk '{if ($1=="DU") print $2}' | xargs git rm
git commit

Answer 3

By having a look at this question, it looks like the recursive strategy with ours or their option doesn't consider a deletion as a conflict.

What you can do though is use this feature to specify a specific strategy for some files. I would bet that the ours strategy (not option) would do the trick for those files.

EDIT:

As stated in the comment, you can't do this !

You should definitly contact Git mailing list if this is a very important feature to you (git@vger.kernel.org)

Answer 4

You can use rebase instead of merge to actualize release branch.