[LRUG] git question

[Tom Stuart]

On 20 Aug 2009, at 12:20, Taryn East wrote:
> Ok, so now I'm guessing that part of the issue is that I did:
> commit, commit,commit,commit... rebase...
> then created *several* patches - the first of which only used the  
> first commit... ie didn't include the rebase.


That doesn't make sense in as much as rebasing effectively abandons  
the original commits and makes new ones. So it's fine to do a bunch of  
commits, then rebase them, then make a patch from "the first one",  
because actually the rebasing operation has recreated that commit on  
top of the upstream changes.

It seems more likely that your mistake has been a failure to actually  
incorporate upstream changes from the Rails repository, because your  
fork is sort of a frozen snapshot of the state of Rails when you  
forked it, and GitHub doesn't provide any magical mechanism to keep  
your fork in sync, so you have to manage this manually one way or  
another.

If you don't already, I strongly recommend you use some sort of local  
visualisation tool (GitX is good if you're on OS X, otherwise git-gui  
will do) to have a look at where your commits live and what they're  
sitting on top of. If you compare this view with the latest commits in  
the Rails repo it should be obvious whether or not you're up-to-date  
with it.

Cheers,
-Tom