Re: git newbie errors

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

I learnt something about git today.  We've been running it in a CVS like
fashion, and that is (apparently) not the way.

What we did was to have one branch in the hub index that our group was
working on, and then we all each had a local branch tracking it, and we
were all working directly on our local tracking branches.

When we then did "git pull" we got some odd merges done into our local
branches.  It was hard to see what had happened and hard to undo.  

I ended up with a fresh git clone, replace the index in the working
directory, and doing a "git reset --hard" today, after a misbegotten
clean up attempt.

So... what we'll do come tomorrow, is:
 - each create a local branch tracking the shared branch on origin
 - branch off from this local tracking branch to do work, and commit all
   of our work to this branch
 - when finished working, switch to the local tracking branch
 - pull ff changes from the shared origin branch
 - merge in the local work branch into the tracking branch
 - handle conflicts
 - push
 - if the push fails (because someone else have pushed since your pull),
   reset --hard your tracking branch, do a new ff pull from origin, do a
   merge from the temp branch and try pushing again (repeat as needed)
 - when push has completed the work branch can be deleted (git branch -d
   will only delete remerged branches)

This is the recommended CVS-like pattern of git (or so I'm told).