How to merge the two different files after the file is renamed

Question

I create a file foo in the git repository on branch master.

Then, I create a new branch dev, using git checkout -b dev.

On the branch dev, I rename it to bar using git mv foo bar.

After that, I change something in the foo and commit it.

But, when I checkout branch dev and git merge master, git doesn't merge it automatically for me and asks me to merge it myself.

So, is foo the ancestor of bar after I execute git mv? Is there any way to let git merge automatically?

`foo` is not an ancestor of `bar` because git doesn't track renames, it tracks only file content. — wRAR, Mar 16 '13 at 11:27
Thank you. I'll try ```hg```, since it supports tracking renames. @wRAR — Wenhao Ji, Mar 16 '13 at 12:10
@wrar It may not track renames but `git-merge-recursive` will certainly detect them by similarity with the ancestor. — Edward Thomson, Mar 16 '13 at 13:06

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

As mentioned in "git merge with renamed files", you should try and adapt the rename threshold:

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.

Still from Tilman Vogel, the script git-merge-associate can help restore the association between two files (one being the renamed version of the other), when the merge doesn't detect the rename.

How to merge the two different files after the file is renamed

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