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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T07:10:23+00:00

Is there a simple way to check if a merge/rebase will yield file conflicts,

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Is there a simple way to check if a merge/rebase will yield file conflicts, without actually performing the merge/rebase?

I want to be able to decide whether to:

  • rebase if the touched file set (mine vs. theirs) are different
  • merge if we’ve been messing with the same files.

Since a bad merge (caused by resolving conflicts the wrong way by human error) is easier to detect and reverse if I do a merge of two heads, rather than having done rebase. Especially if I push my changes and than later realized that something was messed up.

(It’s not possible to always check everything beforehand, as we don’t have a totally comprehensive test-suite.).

And.. I’m running Windows. 🙂

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  1. Editorial Team

    So, with some aid from Martin’s answer, I’ve come up with the rebaseif extension, which does what I want.

    Essentially, it tries to rebase using the internal merge tool, if that fails (which it does for any conflict), it aborts and does a merge with the user’s preferred tool.

    See https://bitbucket.org/marcusl/ml-hgext/src/tip/rebaseif.py for details.

    Update

    In recent months, I’ve gone back to just do a merge, since it’s inherently safe. A non-conflict rebase might still muck things up since dependent files can affect the change. (i.e. a rebase loses information of how the code looked before merge).

    As the rebaseif author, I recommend to use plain old merge instead. 🙂

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