Git workflow and rebase vs merge questions

Question

I\'ve been using Git now for a couple of months on a project with one other developer. I have several years of experience with SVN, so I guess I bring a lot of baggage to th

Answer 1

Anyway, I was following my workflow on a recent branch, and when I tried to merge it back to master, it all went to hell. There were tons of conflicts with things that should have not mattered. The conflicts just made no sense to me. It took me a day to sort everything out, and eventually culminated in a forced push to the remote master, since my local master has all conflicts resolved, but the remote one still wasn't happy.

In neither your partner's nor your suggested workflows should you have come across conflicts that didn't make sense. Even if you had, if you are following the suggested workflows then after resolution a 'forced' push should not be required. It suggests that you haven't actually merged the branch to which you were pushing, but have had to push a branch that wasn't a descendent of the remote tip.

I think you need to look carefully at what happened. Could someone else have (deliberately or not) rewound the remote master branch between your creation of the local branch and the point at which you attempted to merge it back into the local branch?

Compared to many other version control systems I've found that using Git involves less fighting the tool and allows you to get to work on the problems that are fundamental to your source streams. Git doesn't perform magic, so conflicting changes cause conflicts, but it should make it easy to do the write thing by its tracking of commit parentage.