Fun with Git

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 7, 2015, at 3:41 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> OK, so, I am now duly anointed with Just Enough Knowledge in the GnuCash documentation procedures to be dangerous. Woe is unto the Devel mailing list, as I have run into a couple of Problems.
> 
> Simply put, I have edited a number of sections in the Guide in response to a number of bugs. I turned in a patch for one of those bugs (634181), but I have other changes that I would like to send in. The patches affect ch_oview.xml and ch_basics.xml. Following the commands in the wiki (git commit -a) suggested that I was going to get a patch with all the changes to both files, but I just wanted one file at a time. I tried “git commit ch_oview.xml”, which seemed to set me up to create the one file patch, but when I issue the next command prescribed in the wiki (“git pull —rebase”), I get the following:
> 
> dht-retina:C david$ git pull --rebase
> Cannot pull with rebase: You have unstaged changes.
> Please commit or stash them.
> 
> I do not know how to proceed from this.

Now it’s time for you to get dangerous with git. Github has a nice collection of resources at https://help.github.com/articles/good-resources-for-learning-git-and-github/; there’s also Scott Chacon’s excellent book at http://git-scm.com/documentation.

I also highly recommend Atlassian’s free (as in beer) Git GUI SourceTree http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ which makes tailoring commits really easy.

The immediate answer to your question is `git add`: Use that to put individual files into the index and `git commit` *without* the -a to commit just the files in the index. You can use `git status` to show which files are changed and which files are already in the index.

Regards,
John Ralls