This page is a cheat sheet mainly written for myself, and explains (to me, and possibly others, too) how to merge a branch into the main one.
Suppose you have a local git repository on your laptop, for the Sessions app, in /home/myself/projects/Sessions, configured on the main branch.
cd /home/myself/projects/Sessions
Type command:
git status
The result should sound like that (translated from git messages in french, so may be approximate):
On branch main
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/main'.
Nothing to validate, your branch is clean.
You know a friend of you dared to propose a branch named ultimate_fix. Even if the name of this branch has damaged your self-esteem, you decide to merge it. Before doing it, you can, in a first step, produce a diff between the main branch and his branch:
git diff main origin/ultimate_fix
For launching the merge, type the following commands.
git merge --no-commit --no-ff origin/ultimate_fix
git reset HEAD
After this, you should see your friends' modifications, in a not-committed way, just as if you had performed yourself modifications to the main branch. For example, if you want to see the state of your local repo:
git status
You could see something like:
On branch main
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/main'.
Unvalidated modifications:
modified : __init__.py
modified : tr/Custom-fr.po
modified : tr/Custom-nl.po
Unversioned files:
pod/PvCollege.odt.finance
no modification was added at validation (use "git add" or "git commit -a")
Fine! You (I mean: I) can now review these changes, performing any modification on it before committing it (I am suspicious by nature).
In this precise case, one new file has been added, that I will add to the main branch:
git add pod/PvCollege.odt.finance
Then, once everything will look fine, I will commit the changes on the main branch:
git commit -am "[Merge of branch ultimate_fix] I had to rewrite a lot of the proposed modifications, but finally, it works."
git push
Once this has been done, the branch can now be deleted.
git push origin --delete ultimate_fix
