Cousin Ricky <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> I'm trying to learn branches in git, and one bit of advice I've heard,
> from the one video that's been most helpful to me, is that "merging
> locally isn't normally done; instead, changes are pushed and a pull
> request is made."  So I did that, and now my GitHub repo is up-to-date.
> GitHub also assured me that I could delete the branch, so I did that.
>
> But now, I've still got 2 local branches, and my local main[*] does not
> have the changes from the branch.  How do I update the local main if I'm
> not supposed to merge locally?
>
> I have both branches backed up locally, because frankly I don't know
> what I'm doing, and I've corrupted repos before and had to git init or
> git clone from scratch.  It's a hassle maintaining both git and manual
> systems in parallel, but at least I know I won't lose everything on my
> next git stumble.
>
> I've been using git for 4 years now, in part on the promise that it will
> make my life easier.  How can that happen when, after 4 years, this
> software is still utter black magic to me?
>
> [*]"master" using the old terminology.

If you aren't merging into a shared branch (i.e., if you're the only one working
on a project and you aren't updating two branches at once), I wouldn't give it a
second thought. The main idea is to avoid merge commits (which you can easily
end up with anyway if you accept a pr), but you won't have merge commits as a
single user if you

- git checkout some-branch (or) git checkout -b some-new-branch
- make come commits, decide you want to keep them
- git checkout main
- git merge some-branch

The only thing branching is giving you here is a "save point" in case you want
to discard an entire feature. Git, like many things, is as hard as you want to
make it.
-

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