Fun with Git

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 10 February 2015 09:17:29 Colin Law wrote:
> On 10 February 2015 at 05:36, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for the leads. I have been reading, but the descriptions of
> > how it’s supposed to work aren’t matching my experience.
> > Specifically, the manuals all talk about pushing changes onto the
> > repository—but I don’t have push capabilities with the gnucash-docs
> > repository. Thus, when I get errors about needing to push my
> > changes, I don’t know how to get out of the situation.

I'm happy to hear you're making progress in your documentation adventure.

Push access to the main repositories is currently limited to a small set of core developers. So 
it's normal you get an error when you try to push your changes.

> > My realm is
> > “3 ahead”, and I cannot figure out how to proceed. I followed the
> > prompts that said to stash my changes, but now I can’t locate the
> > changes I want to submit for bug 693156. I see the changes in the
> > files on my hard drive, so I know they are there, but for the life
> > of me, I can’t figure out how to get git to get them.

If your local branch is 3 commits ahead of origin (the upstream repository), that means you 
have successfully created 3 commits with the combination of git add/git commit.

To review what is actually in these commits, I usually fire up "gitk" from within my local 
repository directory. That allows me to visually inspect which changes I made and whether they 
are in a shape I want to send upstream.

This may be worthwhile for you as well since these are your first steps and perhaps you did 
things you didn't intend.

If you are satisfied with the way the commits are, you can execute

  git format-patch <parent-branch>

<parent-branch is the branch you originally started off from which I can't deduce from your 
mails. Most likely it should be origin/master in your case.

This command will generate independent patch files, usually called 
"000x-something" in the root of your local repository. These patch files can then be attached to 
a bug report.

As for the stashed changes, Colin already explained how you can recall those. You can also 
display an overview of stashed changes using
git stash --list

In general stashing changes is only needed if you are in the middle of some work you don't 
deem good enough yet to commit, but need to set aside quickly to work on something else first. 
I wouldn't recommend it as the primary management mechanism in git.

You're better of creating lots of branches. For example one branch for each bug you are working 
on. Unless the work on two bugs has big overlaps that is affecting the same lines in the same 
files. In that case you are probably better of doing those changes on the same branch.

One more potential pitfall: create your new branches when you have checked out master, not 
another branch.

Perhaps you can post a screenshot of the gitk window - that would allow me to give you much 
more precise guidance.

Geert