Fun with Git, Redux

[David T.]

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.

Let me begin by saying that I am using a Mac on OS X 10.10.5, and the Git tool I am using is SourceTree 2.0.5.2. I am not a programmer, but I used to think I was, back in the days of Visual Basic.

After my patches from February resulted in an insurmountable (for me, at least) conundrum of patches that would not apply, I completely nuked my local copy of the docs and re-cloned from github, as per the Writing Documentation page. 

With a fresh copy of the docs, I began by creating new branches—one for each bug I was working on. I named each branch with the bug number to keep things straight. This was based on advice I received here. 

I then worked on Bug A in file A, used SourceTree’s Create Patch menu option and got a diff file for this bug. I uploaded the file, and proceeded to the next. I repeated these steps for the other two bugs. (Conveniently, each of these bugs was in a separate chapter of the documentation).

OK, so now my SourceTree window includes multiple patches and branches. Geert has gone in to the respective bugs on Bugzilla and committed the patches (thanks, Geert!, and sorry about the errors!) into the main repository, which means my own patches and branches are superceded and superfluous. I don’t know how to get rid of them, and I don’t know how to update my local docs with the repository. With my current level of skill with Git, the only method I know to clean this up is to nuke it all again and start over, which I am reasonably sure is The Stupidest Way Possible.

On to actual questions:

How do I tell my local copy to sync with the newer version online?

How do I tell my local copy that my changes went into the main repository and no longer need to live locally?

Am I supposed to check something out? (besides passersby)

Should my patches be committed? (or should I?)

Would all of this be easier if I dropped SourceTree altogether and put together a dummy’s list of commandline commands that will walk me through this process?

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. 

I would be extremely grateful for assistance.

David T.