Change merge strategy from 'ort' to 'recursive'

Question

I don't know how, but default merge strategy is ort in my pc, but I want to change that to recursive. I referred some online sources but none of them were useful. Can someone tell me how can I change my default merge strategy?

Answer 1

TLDR; set environment variable GIT_TEST_MERGE_ALGORITHM=recursive

Found out in the source code of git it check first for environment variable GIT_TEST_MERGE_ALGORITHM

once setting the value to recursive it change the default merge strategy. I don't think it's the cleanest solution because of the TEST in the environment variable (probably meant for testing) but it's better then nothing.

Answer 2

You can't:¹ the default merge strategy for git merge, git cherry-pick, etc., is hard-coded.² You can easily run git merge -s recursive, either manually or through an alias.

The -s recursive and -s ort strategies are supposed to produce the same result except when -s recursive would bail out but -s ort can succeed. If you come across cases where this isn't true, report them to the Git developers.

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¹For some definition of "can't" anyway: if you work hard enough at it, you certainly could. For instance, just clone Git and customize it.

²For git merge in particular, the default is octopus when giving multiple heads, and otherwise is whichever of ort or recursive it is for your particular Git version.