Question

git-rebase man page mentions -X<option> can be passed to git-merge. When/how exactly?

I’d like to rebase by applying patches with recursive strategy and theirs option (apply whatever sticks, rather than skipping entire conflicting commits). I don’t want merge, I want to make history linear.

I’ve tried:

git rebase -Xtheirs

and

git rebase -s 'recursive -Xtheirs'

but git rejects -X in both cases.

---

git rebase -Xtheirs works in recent versions, except tree conflicts need to be resolved manually. You need to run git rebase -Xtheirs --continue (with -X repeated) after resolving those conflicts.

Answer 1

You can use this with Git v1.7.3 or later versions.

git rebase --strategy-option theirs ${branch} # Long option
git rebase -X theirs ${branch} # Short option

(which is a short for git rebase --strategy recursive --strategy-option theirs ${branch} as stated by the documentation)

From Git v1.7.3 Release Notes:

git rebase --strategy <s> learned the --strategy-option/-X option to pass extra options that are understood by the chosen merge strategy.

NB: “Ours” and “theirs” mean the opposite of what they do during a straight merge. In other words, “theirs” favors the commits on the current branch.