git - confusion over terminology, “theirs” vs “mine”

Question

I'm completely confused about what mine vs theirs means. In this specific case, I've got a feature branch where I just squashed about 80 commits via rebase -i and am merging this back into develop. I got a few conflicts, and I just want to use whatever code is on my feature branch. I tried "mine" but that actually seemed to do the opposite.

Could someone shed some light on this terminology?

Answer 1

ours and theirs is a somewhat confusing concept; exacerbated when performing a rebase:

When performing a merge, ours refers to the branch you're merging into, and theirs refers to the branch you are merging from. So if you are trying to resolve conflicts in the middle of a merge:

• use ours to accept changes from the branch we are currently on
• use theirs to accept changes from the branch we are merging into.

That makes sense, right?

When rebasing, ours and theirs are inverted. Rebases pick files into a "detached" HEAD branch. The target is that HEAD branch, and merge-from is the original branch before rebase. That makes:

• --ours the anonymous one the rebase is constructing, and
• --theirs the one being rebased;

I.e., rebasing replays the current branch's commits (one at a time) on top of the branch that we intend to rebase with.

Answer 2

"Ours" (and "mine") refer to the current branch; "theirs" refers to the branch being merged in. It sounds like you actually wanted to use "theirs".