Pushing a commit to a branch of a forked repository

Question

I am getting a strange error when updating a forked repository. I already created a dev-branch in the forked repo(for my development work).

1. I have cloned a forked repo

     git clone https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap 

2. Check the current branch

     git branch *master dev-branch 

3. Change to dev-branch

    git checkout dev-branch 

4. make changes and commited them to dev-branch

     git commit 

5. Add remote url

     git remote add parent git@github.com:twbs/bootstrap 

6. when i do a git push now, i am getting error hint: Updates were rejected because the tip of your current branch is behind hint: its remote counterpart

7. So, I did

     git fetch parent git merge parent/master A new commit screen is opened with commit message "Merge remote-tracking branch 'bootstrap/master' into dev-branch" 

8. Still i get the same error, when I do git push

9. Now, I did

     git pull A new commit screen is opened with commit message "Merge branch 'dev-branch' of https://github.com/username/bootsrap into dev-branch 

   10. Now, git push worked.

I don't know what has happened. Did i make a mistake somewhere ? Can someone point out to me the right steps to update and push from a different branch of forked repository ?

Answer 1

What version of git are you using? Older versions of Git used to default to "attempt to push all local branches to the remote", which is what it appears yours tried to do.

Newer versions of Git default to only attempting to push the currently checked out branch to a branch of the same name upstream (which I also dislike). I personally recommend git config --global push.default tracking (or upstream in newer versions), which attempts to push your current branch to its upstream.

In your case, you had two branches, and it tried to push them both. Both were rejected because both were behind.

So no mistake on your part really, although if you prefer a linear history you might want to consider rebase instead of merge.