Re: Question about git

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org> wrote:
> On 05/05/2009 01:28 AM, Shaun McCance wrote:
>
>>> This assumes that the branch is merged into master otherwise.  I strongly
>>> suggest cherry-pick instead of merge.
>>
>> Isn't that going to cause merge conflicts for me the
>> maintainer when I try to merge from my stable branches
>> to master?  I can pretty much guarantee I will always
>> do that.  If I have to deal with merge conflicts from
>> one of 100 translations each time, I'm not going to
>> be happy.
>
> I *think* if the same commit exists in the destination, it doesn't cause a
> merge conflict.  But I didn't test it to make sure right now.

I have tried a few scenarios with 'git merge' and I managed to get a
situation that merge could not take place.
After that, it was not possible to commit and the message was too
cryptic to figure out what to do.
In terms of usability for this process, it was good (I was blocked
from messing up further),
so I resorted to the HowTo item from live.gnome.org named 'Ok, I
messed up, what do I do' in order to reset my clone.

As a workflow, I find that the following is easy to follow
1. First commit to your branch (such as gnome-2-26) as normal.
2. Then, checkout 'master' and 'git merge gnome-2-26'
3. Observe that no errors appear and that only your changes are merged.
4. Do a 'git push' to push your work to git.gnome.org.

In case of error, reset your clone with 'git reset --hard',
(possibly update your tree with 'git pull --rebase'), and start over.


In addition, in the above, the translators are doing the initial
commit in the relevant branch (not master),
and are using "'git merge' with branch", which I think it is
straightforward to follow.

I am OK to add a section in the HowTO for 'git cherry-pick'. I find however
the process more error prone due to the fact that one needs to figure
out the hash
of the last commit(s) in the branch and use that for cherry-picking.

Simos