I had 2 repos on Github: "RepoName" and "RepoName_old". I thought I was going to rebuild my project but changed my mind and have been improving "RepoName_old" ever since. I deleted "RepoName".
If I rename "RepoName_old" to "RepoName" (the deleted repository), will something go horribly wrong? The official documentation warns against trying to pull from a branch associated with the old name...I guess that's a different thing...will GitHub Desktop acknowledge the new name after I make the change?
I have terrible experience mismanaging my git repositories and I want to avoid another setback by being informed and careful.
GitHub Desktop is a local tool which should reflect the changes done on GitHub.
On GitHub side, if you have deleted RemoName, you should be able to rename "RepoName_old" to RepoName.
Check first that it works on github.com.
Then try and clone it in command line, and, with GitHub Desktop, add it from your local folder. That should force GitHub Desktop to recognize RepoName with its new origin URL.
Related
I use github desktop (https://desktop.github.com ) while developing the application with several other people, so, for some reason, when trying to merge two branches into one, the error "unable to merge unrelated histories" is displayed for one of the target branches.
What could be the problem?
First of all: You may also be able to find a solution using the search.
Potential reasons for the error message
From: https://komodor.com/learn/how-to-fix-fatal-refusing-to-merge-unrelated-histories-error
Here are some common scenarios where fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories can occur.
You have a new Git repository with some commits. You then try to pull from an existing remote repo. The merge becomes incompatible because the histories for branch and remote pull are different. Git sees the situation as you trying to merge two completely unrelated branches, and it doesn’t know what to do.
There’s something wrong with the .git directory. It may have been accidentally deleted at some point or got corrupted. This can happen if you’ve cloned or cleaned a project. Here the error occurs because Git doesn’t have the necessary information about your local project’s history.
The branches are at different HEAD positions when you try to push or pull data from a remote repo and cannot be matched due to a lack of commonality.
Options to resolve the issue
The article describes two options on how to resolve/avoid such issues but targets command line /terminal users. I guess I would prefer option 2 over option 1 anyway, also using git in the terminal.
The article explains it like this:
The alternative (and longer) way of fixing refusing to merge unrelated histories issues is to unstage your current commits, stash them, clone your required remote repository, and then place your stashed branch contents into the new clone. This will ensure that any conflicts that you may encounter in the code are addressed before merging and prevent application errors from occurring.
How it (should) work in GitHub Desktop
In GitHub Desktop you should be able to use a modified version of option 2:
To unstage all the files in your last commit, double click staged files. This moves them to the unstaged area. Learn more in this GitHub issue.
To stash your unsaved files, right-click an unstaged file. Learn more about stashing files.
This will give you a clean working tree to pull your remote repository into. Once you’ve successfully pulled into your branch, you can:
unstash your files (see link above again) to reapply them to your current working copy.
commit them as a separate commit.
resolve any file conflicts that you may have.
I hope this explanation adds some clarity. Let me know if there are any wrong or misleading information in my text please.
This problem has several reasons.
But probably your project clone just differs from GitHub (main project).
First of all, save your project (because you probably don't want to code everything again).
Remove repo from GitHub desktop (not GitHub!!!)
Go to the project page in GitHub
Click code, open with GitHub Desktop, and code again.
I thought the default head branch was now called "main", but today, I noticed in a new repo, the default branch was still called "master". But when I wanted to rename it, the popup told me that I should use main?
My colleagues did see main as default, so I'm wondering, why don't I? Am I using an old version or something?
Although I don't see what repo is this related to, what you experience is most likely seeing your own fork instead of the upstream repository.
If your colleagues see main as the master branch and you see master on your side, check whether you don't have your username as a prefix in the repo URL or title (that'd be your fork) and instead try to navigate into the upstream repository (the one without your username as a prefix).
Unless you use a GitHub desktop client the version will be the same as your colleagues have because it's being served by the GitHub servers for all the users (kind of, ignoring A/B testing, load-balancing, CDN, etc) and only GitHub can change the version.
If you use the desktop client, always try to update first before opening tickets/questions as issues might have already been resolved
Every time a try to use github I get tangled in a series of errors that seem to have no solution and I give up. This time I thought I'd try to get help.
I have a local repository created and managed with Xcode. All the local git functions in Xcode work with no problem. Now I want to put this project on github so others can see it. I logged into github and created a repository. It's this one:
lummis/CS193P-2015-Assignment-5
I added a .gitignore file but then deleted it again because I thought it was causing an error. I tried adding a readme file but wasn't able to. I got some error that didn't make sense to me so I gave up on that. So at this point the github repository is empty so far as I can tell.
My local repository has many commits and is currently up-to-date. IOW there is nothing to commit. But when I do "Source Code / Push" I get the following error:
Working copy out of date. Try pulling from the remote to get the
latest changes then push again.
So I try to do that in Xcode by doing "Source Control / Pull". But then I get this error:
"github/master" is not a valid remote branch to pull from. Please
choose a different remote branch.
But there is only one branch. There is no other branch (local or remote) to choose. So I'm stuck in a Xcode-github error loop again. I searched for information about this but didn't find anything relevant. I have the Pro Git book and read and understood it at least thru chapter 2. But that doesn't help on interacting with Xcode.
Can anybody say what I need to do? I thought of deleting the remote repository and starting over but apparently there's no way to do that either!
I know lots of people use github so it must work once you know how to use it but it's a big source of frustration for me.
You have a local repository with "many commits". Let's imagine that we have three:
A---B---C
^
master
Your remote repository on GitHub also contains commits, but they are different ones from what you have locally, e.g.
Y---Z
^
master
At least one of these remote commits was created through the GitHub web interface, which creates a new commit each time you use it.
Because the two repositories contain no common history, Git can't figure out how to handle a push from your local repository to the remote one. It will refuse to accept such a push rather than making any remote commits inaccessible, which is what you usually want.
In this case, commits Y and Z in the remote repository can be discarded. They simply add and then remove a .gitignore file, and you want the remote to reflect what you have locally. The solution is to force push.
Force pushing should generally be avoided, since it can cause commits to be discarded (like Y and Z will be in this case) or to have their hashes changed, which causes major problems with shared repositories. In this instance I don't see any danger in force pushing, which can be accomplished with the -f or --force argument to git push.
(There's nothing fundamentally wrong with force pushing, and in some situations it makes perfect sense, but it should be done with care for the reasons listed above.)
I'd like to manage the GitHub wiki for my project at the same time as I'm developing the code. For example:
Branches
master (stable versions)
develop (development of next version)
Others... (Possible other dev / feature branches)
Ideally, I'd like the wiki to be contained in a subfolder (e.g. /wiki) of the project. Then when I'm making changes to the code I can also update the wiki as the same time (code + documentation change). It'd also mean that all my development code and documentation would be self-contained in the "develop" branch until I merge with the "master" branch. Hopefully, even if via a manual process, the GitHub wiki would then be updated after the merge with master to reflect the changes.
I've taken a look at Git's submodule feature, but from what I understand that usually points at a single revision. I'd like to somehow follow my code development so branching and merging would work as normal.
As explained in "True nature of submodules", you can make modifications and updates within a submodule, as long as you commit also the parent repo in order to record the new state of your "wiki" sub-repo.
If you intend to use Gollum to display and work on your GitHub wiki while it's on your local machine (you probably should), then you will have a trouble if you use submodules.
Gollum wants to do local commits to your local Git repository (but not pushes), but in a submodule .git is actually a file containing the local repository, not a true Git repository. This causes Gollum to break.
Submodules also have the problems that the versions aren't coupled to the parent repository, and they aren't completely de-coupled. It a nuisance to have the source code repository to want to push the new wiki version number (but not the wiki contents) every time you make a documentation change.
The solution I use is simply to clone the wiki repository into a directory inside the main project directory and add it to .gitignore. By using a consistent name for the directory across projects (e.g. github-wiki), the chance is minimized that the wiki won't be in .gitignore and gets accidentally uploaded into the main repository.
For consistency, his approach also works well for GitHub pages, although it's unnecessary as they don't experience the problem with Gollum.
As you know GitHub has introduced a Repo Transfer feature. https://github.com/blog/876-repo-transfers
This allows you to change ownership of your root repos, not forking them with your organization. However, if you have already forked a repo and want to dump all its open issues to newly created one, what should you do?
Is there any solution on GitHub-2-GitHub issues import?
Though Tekkub answer makes sense, I still implemented a short script to transfer issues:
github.com/..../gh-issues-import
You should delete the newly created one and transfer the repo instead. Transferring repo ownership takes the issues with it.
Tekkub wrote a not-so-well-received answer (-2 as of this writing): "You should delete the newly created one and transfer the repo instead. Transferring repo ownership takes the issues with it." He isn't wrong; he just didn't walk through any of the considerations and gotchas. I'll enumerate a few of those below ...
Only Works if you have "admin" access to the parent repo:
In my case, I couldn't use repo-migration because I don't "own" the parent repo so I can't authorize the transfer (parent repo in the hands of a team-member who left). So it doesn't work for me. HOWEVER ... if you do in fact have admin privileges to the parent repo you are migrating, then using the "transfer repo" function is distinctly better and nowhere near as hard as it sounds.
Git history - trivial to keep
One of the commenters expressed concern over the new repo having its own history they don't want to lose. Well, that's the magic of git as a distributed VCS. You simply pull down all branches and tags and everything else to your local repo and then push that history up to the repo you are going to migrate.
git remote add origin1 https://github.com/blah/blah
git remote add origin2 https://github.com/blah/blah
git pull origin1
git push origin2
If you've created issues in both repos ... well that's screwed
Decide which repo has more important content, use that as the base, and port everything else into there. It's a "merge". good luck. The gh-issues-import.py script script posted by ibo.ezhe helps, but it doesn't restore comments on the issues. Feel free to improve it and send him a PullRequest (I did).
There's a Chrome Extension called Kamino that my colleague wrote. It's open source, and works extraordinarily well. It's more for copying issues individually, but he's looking at doing bulk copies as well.
Available here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kamino/ffdebockfdjileaojbbccofhgncmioaf
Source code:
http://github.com/gatewayapps/kamino