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Merging fix branch to master: What's the diff between selecting a local branch or a remote branch? [message #1715478]

Mon, 23 November 2015 22:53

David M. Karr

Messages: 813
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

I have some changes pushed to my github branch, and now I want to merge the branch back to master.

For instructions, I'm starting with https://wiki.eclipse.org/EGit/User_Guide#Merging .

I'm looking at the "Team"->"Merge" dialog, and the instructions from the given doc page.

The instructions say to select a branch to merge to the current branch. I had been on the fix branch, but I switched back to my master to attempt this merge.

From the picture on the doc page, it's pretty clear that you just select the branch you want. However, this picture is only showing "Local" branches. When I view this dialog, I see the local branches, but I also see the "Remote" branch that corresponds to this local branch.

I imagine I'm supposed to select a local branch, but what would happen if I selected the remote branch of the same name? Would it work the same? Would it have bad consequences?

I ask this partially just to determine what I should do, but I'm also asking to try to get clarification on what the docs should be advising here.

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Re: Merging fix branch to master: What's the diff between selecting a local branch or a remote branc [message #1716752 is a reply to message #1715478]

Mon, 07 December 2015 23:36

Matthias Sohn

Messages: 1272
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Always create the merge commit on a local branch, remote tracking branches are only updated by fetch, not by creating a new commit locally.
Then you can push the merge commit you created locally to the remote branch (branch in the remote repository, in your case located on Github).

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