Fun with Git, Redux

[David T.]

Derek, John, and Geert,

Thank you all for providing me with a great deal of hand-holding. I will once again peruse the wealth of information each of you has given me here, and see how much further I can push the Git-rock up the hill before it rolls back down. 

I hope to dig into the Import Chapter thing now.

Cheers,
David

P.S. In my half-assed attempts to restart the process yet again, I ran into some troubles with the boilerplate command sequence listed on the Writing Documentation page that I’d like to mention. Specifically, when I nuked everything, the git clone command resulted in 403 errors that had me puzzled. I learned that OS X includes a version of git that is too old for the command (1.6.1), and that an upgrade of the git tool remedied the situation. You all probably know about these things, but I thought I’d put it into the list in case some other neophyte encounters the same problem…


> On Aug 27, 2015, at 12:45 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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