Re: pushing changes to a remote branch

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 10, 2007, 17:34 UTC
Message-ID: <20070710173401.GB5032@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20070710143614.GA29681@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net>

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 04:36:14PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>   git checkout origin/vim
>     Note: moving to "origin/vim" which isn't a local branch
>   echo change > newfile; git add newfile
>   git commit -m'make change'
>     Created commit 64b8b2e: make change
>      1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
>       create mode 100644 newfile
>   
> If I now checkout master and then return to origin/vim, the commit
> is gone.

That's because 'origin/vim' is a tracking branch for the remote; it's where you store the information "here's what the remote 'origin' thinks is in the branch 'vim'." That's why you get the "note" warning above.

If you want to make changes, you should make a local branch starting from that point:

  git-checkout -b vim origin/vim
  # hack hack hack
  git-commit -m changes

> Much more, however, I am interested how I am supposed to push
> commits back to select remote branches.

Now when you issue a git-push, you will push _your_ 'vim' branch to the remote's 'vim' branch. Before, you didn't _have_ a vim branch, so nothing was pushed.

So the key thing you are missing in all of this is that you shouldn't be doing _anything_ with branches in origin/* (which are, of course, actually refs/remotes/origin/*) except for read-only operations (like diffing against them, merging with them, etc). They are purely for tracking the remote's branches.

-Peff