Much thanks for your extensive writeup, Junio! I will try to follow your advice on a brand new git clone'ed repository and just reapply my changes there into the topic branch (makes sense for these small sets of changes; but not for larger sets ... read my comments below). But for my education, I've interspersed below some questions where I am still misunderstanding the situation or intent behind your recommendation: On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Now what is that topic branch is for? Yes, it is about adding this new > feature, and nothing else. Don't pull other people's changes made on my > tree into it. That will make your topic branch "one new feature and > everything else" and useless as a topic branch. Fair enough, but I don't understand what is referred to by "my tree" above? > > What would make your life easier would be: > > $ git pull ;# to get up to date with me on your master branch I am concluding that I need to throw away (well, saving it off first) my current repo and then do the git pull only from within a fresh git clone? > $ git checkout -b bg/no-progress origin/master > ... work on e802880 ... > ... test it ... > $ git commit ;# record that on bg/no-progress topic > > $ git checkout master > $ git merge bg/no-progress > ... test the result of the merge ... Refering to that git merge bg/no-progress command above. You said not to merge from master to bg/no-progress at this early stage, which makes sense, but now you are going in the reverse via master <-- bg/no-progress. And here I do not see a commit, but that command is followed straight way with a "git checkout bg/no-progress" below. Is that just for testing the merge with the intent of just throwing the changes away? In other words, is this next "git checkout bg/no-progress" command going to silently throw away the "git merge bg/progress" step at this point? > > $ git checkout bg/no-progress > ... work on style fix ... > ... test it ... > $ git commit ;# again record it on bg/no-progress topic > > $ git checkout master > $ git merge bg/no-progress > ... test the result of the merge ... > > $ git pull ;# to get up to date with me > ... resolve conflicts ... > > Then after you are convinced that everything on bg/no-progress is worthy > of sending to the list [*A*], but its tip is stale because things have > progressed on my end, you can do this: Similar question: Is this next "git checkout bg/no-progress" below going to loose the conflicts I would have just resolved above (referring to the most recent "... resolve conflicts ..." line above)? > > $ git checkout bg/no-progress > $ git rebase origin/master ;# and rebase to the upstream > > which may conflict again (but that would be the same conflict you saw with > your "git pull" from me, and rerere may remember it). What does "rerere" mean, or is that a typo? > > Review and test the result and then: > > $ git format-patch origin/master > > There can be variants in the last few steps. For example, your commits on > bg/no-progress may be full of "Oops, this is to fix my own mistake made in > earlier commits since I forked from the upstream". You would not want to > have them in your submission (instead, you would want to pretend as if you > never made these mistakes in the first place). For that, you may want to > do, after you feel the tip of bg/no-progress is in a good shape at point > *A* above: > > $ git checkout bg/no-progress > $ git rebase -i origin/master ;# and rebase to the upstream > > and reorder, squash, and fix them. What do you mean by "reorder, squash" mean here? Is that something that is done as a part of the -i option to git rebase? > > Also you may feel that at point [*A*] what you have is very precious and > you would not want yourself breaking it by the final rebase (which is a > very reasonable thing to feel). In such a case, the final rewrite could > be: > > $ git checkout bg/no-progress^0 > $ git rebase -i origin/master ;# and rebase to the upstream > ... test and review the result. > ... convince yourself it is indeed better than > ... what you earlier thought to be "very precious". > ... and then finally > $ git branch -f bg/no-progress > $ git format-patch origin/master ;# send this What is the significance of the ^0 construct tacked onto the end of "bg/no-progress" at this point, versus just "git checkout bg/no-progress" without the "^0"? I made the mistake of reading the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in git-rev-parse(1) manual, which states: A suffix ^ to a revision parameter means the first parent of that commit object. ^<n> means the <n>th parent (i.e. rev^ is equivalent to rev^1). As a special rule, rev^0 means the commit itself and is used when rev is the object name of a tag object that refers to a commit object. I'm having a hard time translating "tag object" and "commit object" into things I understand w.r.t. the repo I see from my end. > > And to finish it off, you may do: > > $ git checkout master > $ git merge --ours bg/no-progress The --ours option to git-merge does not seem to be documented (at least it is not in the user manual). There is a --ours option indicated in the git-checkout man page. > > The above is a suggestion based on a design to allow you keep sticking to > your merge based workflow as much as possible, but you could instead > choose to keep rebasing. I have some observations at the end of > > http://gitster.livejournal.com/24080.html > > comparing the merge based workflow and the rebase based one. > The rebase flow would work better for this given that I do eventually want to send my changes upstream. So, for my/our future Googling reference: I quote the section out of http://gitster.livejournal.com/24080.html that I believe applied to me _before_ I messed things up so badly: your_blog> Another advantage of rebasing your personal patch constantly is that your_blog> it forces you a discipline to adjust your changes to the changes in your_blog> the upstream as early as possible. If you do not rebase and choose to your_blog> use merge in your workflow, your personal changes will be buried deep your_blog> in the history. When one of your many later merges with the upstream your_blog> made you resolve the conflicts with such old changes, two things your_blog> happen: your_blog> your_blog> * You do not remember what your own change was about, and have a your_blog> hard time resolving the conflict; your_blog> your_blog> * You may be able to resolve the conflict, but what you can your_blog> extract from "git log --no-merges origin.." will not be your_blog> something you can eventually send upstream. You will need to your_blog> rebase before submitting. Again, much MUCH thanks for your assistance! Brent -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html