1. it’s possible to get into a bad state 2. it’s not clear what exactly that state is 3. it’s not clear how you got into that state 4. it’s not clear how to get out of it
I understand Git reasonably well. I know a good bit how it works under the hood. When I have a gitastrophe I rarely understand what I did wrong and how to avoid it in the future.
Here’s a recent post from a friend:
“ 0) clicked fetch all to make sure I had latest everything 1) right clicked on master and selected "merge master into branch" 2) made sure there were no merge errors 3) get on the master branch 4) clicked pull again because sometimes switching to branches doesn't work without it 5) right clicked on my branch and selected "merge branch into master" 6) clicked check in and push buttons
About an hour later, someone noticed that everyone's work from the past week was gone. I mean the checkins were still there in the graph, but all their code was basically gone in latest. And because my branch had many commits in it, apparently no one could just revert my merge and it took someone an hour to work out how to fix everything during which no one could touch git”
Somewhere along the way he didn’t do what he thought he did. No one could figure out what he actually did wrong. No lessons were learned from this Gitastrophe.
