Re: [Rails-devel] Git troubleshooting

[brett l. <bre...@gm...>]

Ok... I've made a few small commits with EGit, and I think I'm getting
the hang of the interface. It's a bit clumsy, but it seems to do
everything I expect. The EGit user guide is a fairly lengthy document,
but as Stefan noted earlier, it's got a lot of important details that
will help you learn the interface:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/EGit/User_Guide

I think everyone should probably take a step back. I have a feeling we
tried to run before we learned to walk. ;-)

Set aside the work you've done, do a clean clone of the repo in a new
location following the EGit User Guide. Then, find some small one-line
change to make. Commit it, push it, as directed by the User Guide.
Let's try to get everyone to commit and successfully push a few small
changes before we try to bite off anything bigger. Once we've got a
few pushes and pulls done, we can come back to the bigger pieces of
work that are being done.

Next...

Also, in your git configs (usually a .gitconfig file in your home
directory), it's very handy to default to always rebasing incoming
changes. Merge commits are supposed to be meaningful, but the default
behavior is to always merge incoming changes (and create a merge
commit for them). The tradeoff here is that rebasing changes the
commit history, which is potentially dangerous and less obvious than
adding a bunch of extraneous merge commits every time you do a pull.

You can configure certain branches to always do this without the --rebase flag:

# make `git pull` on master always use rebase
$ git config branch.master.rebase true
You can also set up a global option to set the last property for every
new tracked branch:

# setup rebase for every tracking branch
$ git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always

The .gitconfig is an ini-style file, so the above is also represented
as this if you want to update the file directly:

[branch]
   autosetuprebase = always


Finally...

I'm happy to continue lending support as y'all run into troubles. It
took me a while to fully acclimate to Git's workflow, too. It's
different, but very powerful once we get past the first few hurdles.
:-)

---Brett.