What git gotchas have you been caught by?

Question

The worst one I\'ve been caught by was with git submodules. I had a submodule for a project on github. The project was unmaintained, and I wanted to submit patches, but co

Answer 1

The usual trailing slash when adding a submodule:

When you use git add on a submodule, make sure you don’t have a tailing slash.

> git add local/path
  -- adds the submodule

> git add local/path/
  -- adds all the files in the submodule directly into your repository, big no-no

Answer 2

1. Only realising you've forgotten an entry in .gitignore once you've got matches spread across a load of branches.

2. Forgetting that git add doesn't add what's not there...

   git add .
   git commit
   git status
   //hey! why didn't it commit my deletes?, Oh yeah, silly me
   git add -u
   git commit --amend
   

3. If you do a git branch list, you get a new branch called list, but if you do a git stash, you get your workspace stashed; for stash, you need the list if you want the list...

More soon, probably...

Answer 3

Create a new branch:

git branch new-branch

Work, commit, work ... Realise all my work is on master, not on the new branch.

I should have done:

git checkout -b new-branch

Why can't I do something like:

git branch -c new-branch

(c for checkout) with an option to make that the default behaviour???

Answer 4

Publishing to public repository without realizing my git config user.name was incorrect.
That means the public repo now gets a name (and an email) I would rather not have published at all. If that repo is replicated, ... it is too late.

That is why I prefer having my user.name displayed in my git prompt shell, meaning instead of having this:

 MY_HOSTNAME /c/Prog/myGitProject (master)$

I see this:

 MY_HOSTNAME /c/Prog/myGitProject (master) VonC $

I know who I am from the very first command I type in this Git bash session!

Answer 5

Work work work. Start staging a change. Notice you don't want everything committed. Stage a partial commit carefully.

Eventually decide that this isn't ready for the current branch. I want to commit the staged changes to a new temporary branch. Sounds so trivial conceptually, right?

Google for how to do this. Top answer says stash, checkout -b newbranch, stash pop. Do this begrudgingly, wondering why there isn't an easier way.

Find that this completely wiped the distinction between your staged and unstaged changes. Thanks, Git!

Answer 6

One of my most embarrassing moments with a git repository, though it's more about sed:

I was once doing a find ... -exec sed -i ... operation in a subdirectory of my repository. I'd tested it without the -i first, got distracted, came back and managed to switch to the top directory in my repo before running it. Now, git's important files are all read-only, but sed -i by default shuffles the file away by renaming then writes back to the original, so it works just fine on a read-only file like git's objects. The substitution wasn't reversible, and I had to recover the repository by cloning and fetching from someone who tracked mine as a remote.

I never even thought for a moment that sed would work on read-only files. Moral of the story: use sed -i -c, which copies the file, then attempts to overwrite the original.