git-fix-pull

Fixing Git Pull

For our 320 repo (and in general), you should run git pull often so you'll have the latest code/test/etc.

A common situation where git pull doesn't work is when (a) there's a new version of some file on GitHub and (b) you made changes to the old version on your computer. Git doesn't want to pull because it doesn't want to erase your changes.

Let's practice resolving this issue.

1. on your VM, cd to labs/git-fix-pull in our semester repo
2. run unzip pull.zip
3. this creates a repo, pull-practice -- cd into it
4. edit example.py so that it prints "Hello World" instead of just "Hello"
5. run git status and git diff to see the change
6. try running git pull

You should see an error like this:

remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 3 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 267 bytes | 267.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/cs320-wisc/pull-practice
   729fc4a..30dccb4  main       -> origin/main
Updating 729fc4a..30dccb4
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
	example.py
Please commit your changes or stash them before you merge.
Aborting

There's a new version of example.py on GitHub, but git doesn't want to overwrite your change. One way to fix this is with "stashing", as the error suggests. We won't cover stashing in 320, but feel free to read about it on your own.

The easiest way to solve this is to undo your changes (perhaps after backing them up to another file), then pull again. Let's try that:

7. cp example.py backup-example.py
8. git restore example.py (this undoes your changes)
9. git pull

You'll now have the version with your changes in backup-example.py and the latest version from GitHub in example.py.