Fun with Git, Redux

[Geert Janssens]

On Thursday 27 August 2015 17:29:06 John Ralls wrote:
> > On Aug 27, 2015, at 3:34 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I apologize in advance for my utter inability to understand this
> > whole Git realm.
> > 
> > I have a sincere desire to help with the documentation, but what I
> > would like to do is focus on the writing, and not with the Gitting.
> > Unfortunately, instead of writing or editing documentation, I spend
> > hours trying to understand the simplest of steps in the Git world,
> > and this has me exceedingly frustrated.
> > 
I sympathize with your frustration. Git is a powerful tools and unfortunately that comes with a 
learning curve.

Luckily you don't need to know all of git to get to documentation writing. John and Derek 
already gave their insights on the initial work.

What I'd add is: don't spend hours searching for how to do things in git. Ask early on instead. 
Either here on the list or on irc (the latter allow for a more interactive conversation, but we're 
not always there).

<snip>

> > How do I tell my local copy that my changes went into the main
> > repository and no longer need to live locally?
> There are two ways, rebase the branch onto maint which would normally
> make it go away because maint will already have the commit or just
> force-delete the branch unmerged. In this particular case rebasing
> will have conflicts because Geert had to make some changes first.

I pushed my fixes in separate commits, so the rebase would probably still work in this case 
(that's also why I decided to make separate commits).

<snip>

> > During my last Git episode, I created my own github account and
> > mirrored gnucash-docs, but I have no idea how to utilize this in a
> > meaningful way.
> Once you’ve created a branch and committed changes to it you can push
> that branch to Github and use Github to issue a pull request. That’s
> less work than writing up a bug report just to contribute a change;
> in the case of a multi-commit branch it’s a lot less work at both
> ends.
> 
So to be clear, this is optional. But can come in handy when you're getting more used to 
working with git and commits.

Good luck !

Regards,

Geert