Elijah Newren authored Jun 30, 2018 and Junio C Hamano committed Jul 11, 2018

builtin/merge.c says that when we are about to perform a merge:

    ...the index must be in sync with the head commit.  The strategies are
    responsible to ensure this.

merge-recursive has always relied on unpack_trees() to enforce this
requirement, except in the case of an "Already up to date!" merge.
unpack-trees.c does not actually enforce this requirement, though.  It
allows for a pair of exceptions, in cases which it refers to as #14(ALT)
and #2ALT.  Documentation/technical/trivial-merge.txt can be consulted for
the precise meanings of the various case numbers and their meanings for
unpack-trees.c, but we have a high-level description of the intent behind
these two exceptions in a combined and summarized form in
Documentation/git-merge.txt:

    ...[merge will] abort if there are any changes registered in the index
    relative to the `HEAD` commit.  (One exception is when the changed index
    entries are in the state that would result from the merge already.)

While this high-level description does describe conditions under which it
would be safe to allow the index to diverge from HEAD, it does not match
what is actually implemented.  In particular, unpack-trees.c has no
knowledge of renames, and these two exceptions were written assuming that
no renames take place.  Once renames get into the mix, it is no longer
safe to allow the index to not match for #2ALT.  We could modify
unpack-trees to only allow #14(ALT) as an exception, but that would be
more strict than required for the resolve strategy (since the resolve
strategy doesn't handle renames at all).  Therefore, unpack_trees.c seems
like the wrong place to fix this.

Further, if someone fixes the combination of break and rename detection
and modifies merge-recursive to take advantage of the combination, then it
will also no longer be safe to allow the index to not match for #14(ALT)
when the recursive strategy is in use.  Therefore, leaving one of the
exceptions in place with the recursive merge strategy feels like we are
just leaving a latent bug in the code for folks in the future to stumble
across.

It may be possible to fix both unpack-trees and merge-recursive in a way
that implements the exception as stated in Documentation/git-merge.txt,
but it would be somewhat complex, possibly also buggy at first, and
ultimately, not all that valuable.  Instead, just enforce the requirement
stated in builtin/merge.c; error out if the index does not match the HEAD
commit, just like the 'ours' and 'octopus' strategies do.

Some testcase fixups were in order:
  t7611: had many tests designed to show that `git merge --abort` could
	 not always restore the index and working tree to the state they
	 were in before the merge started.  The tests that were associated
	 with having changes in the index before the merge started are no
         longer applicable, so they have been removed.
  t7504: had a few tests that had stray staged changes that were not
         actually part of the test under consideration
  t6044: We no longer expect stray staged changes to sometimes result
         in the merge continuing.  Also, fix a case where a merge
         didn't abort but should have.

Signed-off-by: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>