XCode git pull后的工作流程混乱

Question

I've used other DVCS systems before but I'm new to git. So I think I have wrong assumptions about how to use it the way I intend.

I have a RepoA which has a master and develop branch where I do the majority of my work. A while back, I cloned RepoB from RepoA to start working on "BigFeatureA" and also did this in the develop branch. I'm not finished with BigFeatureA but want to bring over all the changes that have been made in RepoA since I did the clone so that I continue to work on BigFeatureA using the most up to date code. (At the moment in RepoA, the develop and master branches are the same but of course, sometimes they're not.) Using XCode working in RepoB, I did a Pull from RepoA develop branch. I had a conflict, resolved it, Pull button enabled and then did the pull.

Now in RepoB, all the changes brought over are "uncommitted changes" and the files are showing "M's" or modified. So none of the commit messages or anything came over from RepoA, just the source changes. This isn't what I expected. Is this just XCode's version of git workflow or is this just how git merge works?

My final workflow was to push RepoB to RepoA when BigFeatureA was done. Is there a difference between doing that and going the other direction, ie: be in RepoA and pulling from RepoB?

(Further reading suggests that I probably should have created a "BigFeatureA" branch in RepoB and then done a pull from RepoA on the develop branch in there and then a merge from the BigFeatureA branch into the develop branch. Would there have been a difference doing a merge between branches vs repo's?)

Answer 1

No, this is not the expected behaviour. The reason it was leaving all the changes as modified files was because it had "given up" on the merge.

Information that I did not know was relevant at the time of the posting -> I had created the repository originally not knowing about putting .DS_Store in the .gitignore file. I have had *.DS_Store there for a long time, but I probably hadn't cleaned up properly after doing that. It looks like there were "many" .DS_Store files in the repository and putting it in the .gitignore file appears to just mean "from now forward", not "from what I did before".

So above, Xcode complained about the .DS_Store file being modified and since it didn't know how to resolve conflicts in files of that type, it just gives up. It didn't handle the fact that the file had been deleted already in RepoA, it needed to be deleted in RepoB too. Secondarily, although it said .DS_Store in the file list, it was not the .DS_Store in the main folder, it was one or more .DS_Store files somewhere down the file hierarchy. So no matter how many times I deleted the top level .DS_Store in git via the command line, Xcode was never happy. So I couldn't tell which .DS_Store file it was talking about. Looks like Xcode is not good about having multiple files of the same name in your project.

Fix is to follow another SO post where you find all the .DS_Store's in your hierarchy, git rm them and then git commit all via the command line. Then the Xcode merge will complete and you won't be left with modified files from a pull.