How to resolve conflict of renamed folder of file

Question

I have following problem:

I have some common commit A for two branches Branch1 and Branch2.

• Branch1 is a public branch (lies on server)
• Branch2 is a local branch

In Branch1 I changed file (BAD_folder/somefile.txt). Changes were pushed to server. In Branch2 I renamed BAD_folder to folder and made some changes in somefile.txt. I want to merge Branch1 with Branch2, but I get a merge conflict in BAD_folder/somefile.txt file.

How can I resolve this?

Answer 1

You can rename folder to BAD_folder, merge or rebase Branch2 (which might be better when this branch is local) and rename folder back.

1. git checkout -b _tmp Branch1
2. git mv folder BAD_folder && git commit
3. git merge Branch2
4. git mv BAD_folder && git commit

When you did a rebase, you can do an additional git rebase -i Branch1 and remove the two git mv operations.

merge in point 3 works much better when filenames did not change but you might still have to resolve conflicts.