Question

I’m trying to write a tool that is based on git but does some rather unusual stuff, and I need to know: is it safe to run multiple instances of git merge --ff-only [remote-branch] at once to get the newest commit available on any of them? All the remotes will be on the same line of commits. I’d like to be able to have my tool just spawn them all and let git sort it out, but I need to know if this will cause problems. Does anyone know enough about git internals to say one way or the other?

Answer 1

If you are doing –ff-only merges, why don’t you just inspect the references with git branch --contains or some other way to see if the old commit is reachable and then do either a reset or update-ref?

This should be very fast and would potentially avoid updating the working directory.