Ken's Techno Tidbits

I’d been working away on the Bixo project, and pushing changes to GitHub without any problems.

Then I made the mistake of pulling in a new branch, versus creating the branch.

% git checkout origin cfetcher
% git pull

This merged the remote branch into my local master branch, with bizarre results. After a few attempts at trying to back it out, I blew away my local directory and just re-cloned the remote cfetcher branch, since that’s where I’d be working for the next few days. Unfortunately when I cloned it, I did:

% git clone git://github.com/emi/bixo.git

That created a clone using the GitHub “Public Clone URL”, not the “Your Clone URL”, which is git@github.com:emi/bixo.git. Oops.

Everything worked, though, until I wanted to push back some changes:

% git push
fatal: protocol error: expected sha/ref, got '
*********'

You can't push to git://github.com/user/repo.git
Use git@github.com:user/repo.git

*********'

Expected sha/ref? Though the error message had all of the info I needed, just not in a format that was obvious. For example, a good message would have said:

You can't push to git://github.com/emi/bixo.git
Update the url for the "origin" remote in your .git/config file to use git@github.com:emi/bixo.git

Eventually the Supercharged git-daemon blog post at GitHub cleared things up for me. I edited the URL entry in my .git/config file, and all is (once again) well.

[remote "origin"]
    url = git@github.com:emi/bixo.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

I’m working on a new project in GitHub called Bixo, and recently had to merge in a fork from Chris Wensel. After poking around on the web a bit, I found some very useful information in Willem’s blog post on Remote branches in git.

There was one minor error, though, in the “Merging back a fork” section. After the “git remote add…” command, you have to do a “git fetch <remote>” command to first fetch the remote branches before you can successfully do a “git branch <branch name> <remote/branch>” command.

So in my case, this meant:

% cd git/github/bixo
% git remote add chris git://github.com/cwensel/bixo.git
% git fetch chris
% git branch chris-fork chris/master

And once that worked, I could merge from his branch to mine, and push back the changes.

Slowly but surely the git model accretes in my head.