Help with Pull Request

[Rainer Müller]

On 2018-05-03 12:14, Marcus Calhoun-Lopez wrote:
> The only git commands I have been running (not in this order) are
>     git pull --rebase upstream master
>     git pull --rebase origin cargo-pg
>     git pull --rebase origin master
>     git push origin cargo-pg
> where
>     cargo-pg is the name of my branch and upstream is
>     git remote add upstream https://github.com/macports/macports-ports.git

With 'git pull --rebase', you instruct git to take the specified remote
and put all commits that are not in the remote on top of the branch.

git pull --rebase upstream master
This brought in new commits from the master branch and put the local
commits on top. This is what you wanted.

git pull --rebase origin cargo-pg
This started with the cargo-pg branch, but then the new local commits
(that came from master, but are not yet on cargo-pg), were put on top.
Now you have the commits from cargo-pg first, then the commits that were
done on master. This is the wrong order and not what you wanted.

Usually, you never want to rebase with anything else than
upstream/master. You always want to start with the state of upstream,
then put your new commits on top of that. You would first switch to the
branch you want to work on, then run rebase:
$ git checkout cargo-pg
$ git pull --rebase upstream master


After that advice for the future, there are two things to be fixed here.
One is your master branch and one is the cargo-pg branch. Let's start
with the cargo-pg branch.

Switch to the branch and rebase again on top of the current state of
upstream/master. This will start with upstream, then put all local
commits on top. Although you had "cloned" commits from upstream/master
to this branch before, this will still do what you wanted. In case a
commit results in an empty patch (has been applied before), it will be
dropped during rebase. Therefore all the commits that are not meant to
be on this branch will be gone after running these commands.

$ git checkout cargo-pg
$ git pull --rebase upstream master
(verify results in 'git log')
$ git push --force origin cargo-pg

Now, let's go to the master branch. It is diverged because there is a
commit for octave on it, then lots of "cloned" commits from
upstream/master. Again, you can get rid of the "cloned" commits by
running rebase again. As this one commit for octave is also already in
upstream/master, there will be no local commits left after these commands:

$ git checkout master
$ git pull --rebase upstream master
(verify results in 'git log', should be identical to upstream/master)
$ git push --force origin master


'git push --force' is considered dangerous because it allows you push a
branch state that removes commits that were pushed previously. But
sometimes this is exactly what you need to clean up.

'git push --force' can only have unwanted effects when you are
collaborating with others. By changing the branch such that commits are
now missing, others might no longer be able to pull changes from the
branch. However, these are branches in your personal fork, so you can do
with the branches whatever you want. It is also unlikely that anyone
else has a clone of your repository.

Hope this helps!

Rainer