Re: an LM update

[Trevor Daniels]

Graham Percival wrote Wednesday, March 25, 2009 1:06 PM
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 05:15:32PM +0100, John Mandereau wrote:
> > Hi James,
> > James E. Bailey a écrit :
> > > Leave it to me to take something easy and make it difficult. So, 
> > > I had
> > > a conflict.
> > Please take half an hour to read sections "HOW CONFLICTS ARE 
> > PRESENTED"
> > and "HOW TO RESOLVE CONFLICTS" in "git merge" documentation (the 
> > man
> > page if you're on Linux, or in HTML on Git web site anyway), as
> > suggested in the CG.  I know you've already been making 
> > significant
> > effort to get used to Git and Texinfo, but that's really worth 
> > it: after
> > this, you'll never be scared by conflicts any more.
>
> Ick.  Do we really need to ask casual contributors to spend 30
> minutes reading how to use git?  Isn't there any faster way to
> give the instructions?  Like

It's not that easy ...

> - copy the conflicted file to a backup name
> - delete the file
> - do "git reset --hard"

This would reset to the current HEAD, putting back the
file containing the local changes which are in conflict
if they had already been committed (as they had).

> - do "git pull origin"

This would then just result in a repeat of the conflict

> - compare the conflicted file and the new version, and make
>  whatever changes to the new version that you want.

You could try a git reset --hard HEAD^ which would
also remove the last local commit, but it makes the
assumption that the conflicting local commit -is- the
last one committed.  It may not be.

Git is a complex beast and any simplistic recipe is
going to fail under some circumstances.

I really think if anyone has gone to the trouble of
setting up a local git repository it is best for them
to learn how to use it properly.  I personally found
git gui and gitk invaluable when learning and still
prefer to use them over command line, which seems
rather like flying blind to me.

Trevor