从实时服务器到中央存储库的“ git push --force”

Question

The answer to similar questions on SO seems to always be "merge/pull before pushing" or "don't get into the situation in the first place". Neither of those apply.

I've inherited maintenance of a website in which ongoing development has branched from maintenance of the old site. However, I've discovered that legacy fixes weren't always made local->git->test->live. Sometimes they were test->live, skipping git, and sometimes they were made directly to Live.

Thus, the Live environment does not exactly match any git commit nor the test server nor my local environment. This is a problem.

I created a new branch for how live currently is, but when I tried to push, git refused -- claiming changes had been made to the central repository, and "non-fast-forward updates were rejected".

I don't want to merge into the live server. I think the unmerged changes are developmental (proper branch management wasn't always fastidiously followed), but even if there are fixes in the central that should be live, the live server is not the place to perform that merge.

The answer seems to be a "git push --force" from live, and deal with merges and general git cleanup on the local.

But I haven't used --force before, and from my searching for an answer, it seems to sometimes work differently than what people expect.

So, I need a sanity-check. will:

git checkout -b new_branch_name
git add -u
git add *
git commit -m "new branch to match how live is currently"
git push --force

push my new branch to the central repository exactly how it is on the server from which I'm running the commands, without affecting any other branches?

Contrarily, is there a better method to deal with getting the git repositories cleaned up, and a testing environment that matches live?

Since this is the live server, I can't just-try-it-and-see-if-it-works.

Answer 1

Here's what I ended up doing:

Just to avoid trying out how-I-think-git-works-but-I-haven't-actually-done-this-trick-previously on a live site, I created a NEW local repo from the current contents of the live server. From here, I can get fancy -- on my LOCAL drive -- with comparing and moving branches between repos, until I have this mess cleaned up.

Holding off on accepting my answer, in case someone with more knowledge posts a better one.