git merge with renamed files

Question

I have a large website that I am moving into a new framework and in the process adding git. The current site doesn't have any version control on it.

I started by copying the site into a new git repository. I made a new branch and made all of the changes that were needed to make it work with the new framework. One of those steps was changing the file extension of all of the pages.

Now in the time that I have been working on the new site changes have been made to files on the old site. So I switched to master and copied all of those changes in.

The problem is when I merge the branch with the new framework back onto master there is a conflict on every file that was changed on the master branch.

I wouldn't be to worried about it but there are a couple of hundred files with changes. I have tried git rebase and git rebase --merge with no luck.

How can I merge these 2 branches without dealing with every file?

Answer 1

Since git 1.7.4, you can specify the rename threshold for merge as git merge -X rename-threshold=25 in order to control that a similarity of 25% is already enough to consider two files rename candidates. This, depending on the case together with -X ignore-space-change may make rename detection more reliable.

However, I wanted to have more direct control and was cooking up a related script the last days. Maybe it helps - let me know.

https://gist.github.com/894374