I’m working with others on a paper written in LaTeX. It’s stored in a git repository. I figured it would be easy for all of us to track and merge each other’s changes this way. So my friend clones the repo, commits a change, and sends me an email to let me know. At this point, I thought, great, let’s grab his changes, review and merge them.
I’m sure this is obvious and is documented elsewhere, but it wasn’t to me. It’s not conceptually different than two programmers sharing code, which I’m sure is one of the common usages of git.
So I thought, well, I can just track his ‘master’ branch in my repo and merge the changes.
# this doesn't work git branch --track friend-master/path/to/other/repo master
No, this doesn’t work. I have to add my friend’s repo as a remote in my local repo first.
#this works git remote add friend /path/to/other/repo
This says “Hey, I’m interested in the repo at /path/to/other/repo , and from now on I’m calling it “friend.” Does this mean I can track the branch now?
#not yet git branch --track friend-master friend/master
No, first I have to fetch the remote so that my local repo is aware of what branches exist there.
#this grabs stuff from my friend's repo git fetch friend
Specifying “friend” is necessary, because git will pull by your default repo if one is not specified (and your default is probably “origin”). At this point, we can track the branch and merge.
git merge friend/master
Summary:
git remote add friend /path/to/other/repo git fetch friend git merge friend/master
It’s actually pretty simple. It might even be obvious, provided you already understand the way git works. Otherwise, you might find this useful.
