Refactor merge strategies into separate includable file.

Signed-off-by: Jon Loeliger <jdl@freescale.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>

1 files changed, 35 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/merge-strategies.txt b/Documentation/merge-strategies.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..3ec56d22eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/merge-strategies.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+MERGE STRATEGIES
+----------------
+
+resolve::
+	This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch
+	and another branch you pulled from) using 3-way merge
+	algorithm.  It tries to carefully detect criss-cross
+	merge ambiguities and is considered generally safe and
+	fast.  This is the default merge strategy when pulling
+	one branch.
+
+recursive::
+	This can only resolve two heads using 3-way merge
+	algorithm.  When there are more than one common
+	ancestors that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a
+	merged tree of the common ancestores and uses that as
+	the reference tree for the 3-way merge.  This has been
+	reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without
+	causing mis-merges by tests done on actual merge commits
+	taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history.
+	Additionally this can detect and handle merges involving
+	renames.
+
+octopus::
+	This resolves more than two-head case, but refuses to do
+	complex merge that needs manual resolution.  It is
+	primarily meant to be used for bundling topic branch
+	heads together.  This is the default merge strategy when
+	pulling more than one branch.
+
+ours::
+	This resolves any number of heads, but the result of the
+	merge is always the current branch head.  It is meant to
+	be used to supersede old development history of side
+	branches.