A git merge question!!

[Billy Sclater]

I have a test branch and of course there is a master branch!!
The master branch contains several projects.
I have made several changes to 'one' of those projects.
So master is ahead on all the other projects, and behind on mine.

There is one other developer working on the same project as me, but she is working directly on master.

I'd like to merge my branch into master :/

This is how I 'think' it should go.

git checkout test
git pull --rebase (make sure my test branch is up to date)
git merge master (make sure my branch is in sync with master as much as possible, whilst preserving my changes).
'git add file xyz and so on to resolve any conflicts
git checkout master
git merge test (I believe this should now work smoothly without conflict).

2 questions:

#1 Do my steps look correct?
#2 After a git merge, is it necessary to do a git push? (both master and test are remotes

[Jaikiran Pai]

The way I usually go about this is by using git rebase. So my steps would be something like this (right from the very beginning before changing anything in my test branch):

# Checkout the "test" branch
git checkout test
# You are now on test branch, now do any edits that you want to do to any files
(do my edits/changes)
# Commit locally your changes in the test branch
git commit -m "Some changes" ./
# Now assume your teammate has committed some changes to the master branch in the remote repo and let's assume you have aliased/named the remote repo as upstream. Now we rebase our local changes "on top of" the changes done in the remote repo's master branch
git rebase upstream/master

If there are any conflicting changes, the rebase process will pause and show you the conflicts and you can then fix the conflicts and do a git add/rm depending on the way you want to resolve them and then continue the rebase by issuing git rebase --continue


Once the rebase is complete your local test branch will now have all the commits from remote master branch plus your local commit on top of them. Remember though that all of this is still local. So if you want to push this to the test branch of the remote repo you just issue a push:

# Assume that upstream is the alias/name that you have assigned to the remote repo
git push upstream test

[Billy Sclater]

Thanks (:

But, will this rebase, rewrite the history of my test branch?
So when I do a :

git log

in my test branch, will it now show the master history?

[Jaikiran Pai]

Yes. So if your test branch earlier had:

commit pqr <-- another of your local commit in test branch
commit xyz <-- your local commit in test branch
commit abc <-- A commit which is also there in remote master branch
...

Assume you were the one who did the local commit xyz and commit pqr after you had created the test branch from the master branch. Now assume your teammate did a commit mno in the remote master branch. Now when you do the rebase as I suggested in the previous post, after a successful rebase the commit history will be:

commit pqr <-- another of your local commit in test branch
commit xyz <-- your local commit in test branch
commit mno <-- the commit which was done by your teammate in the remote master repo
commit abc <-- A commit which is also there in remote master branch

So as you can see, the local commits were literally rebased "on top of" what's there in the remote master branch.

By the way, this (free online) book explains all of this in a very good and simple to understand terms http://git-scm.com/book

[Billy Sclater]

Thanks, and thanks for the book!!

So, also just out of curiosity, would the steps in my original post also work?

[Billy Sclater]

Followed the instructions, however I had one anomaly!!!

In my test branch I had an extra folder 'utils'.

After running:

git rebase master

The folder had been removed, also there was no mention of it being removed in the console :/

Any idea why this happened? And how to avoid it?

[Jaikiran Pai]

Was that folder added (using git add) or committed (using git commit) to your local test branch? Or was it just lying around untracked?

[Billy Sclater]

I added everything yesterday using:

git add -A .

from my project root.

Then:

git commit -a -m "Some message"

Then:

git push origin test

Today, I immediatley ran:

git checkout test
git rebase master