Learning experience with git push

TL;DR, #1: merges in all branches in a directory/local repo will be pushed regardless of the current branch when push is done, #2 use a new clone “every” time you make a change, #3 git pull is an implicit merge without a commit and shows up in the shared remote repo when local is pushed

So I’ve been doing my merges from our release branch to master in a clone in directory /work. This directory is “clean”, no development taking place or changing files, so I have been reusing this directory, probably not the best practice as I’m about to find out.

Another developer, “Joe”, and I were doing some experimentation, so I went to /work because I knew it was clean and checked out Joe’s branch “A”, then did a merge of branch “B” into it to see if we could see changes between the two branches.

Later on I wanted to move some files from one of my dev branches into a new branch, so in my clean /work directory I did a git checkout -b new-branch, copied the files over, did git add and git commit of these. Then did a git push origin.

Turns out, doing a push from the new branch doesn’t only commit the changes on the branch I’m in but in all branches in the local repo that I was sitting in. So the merge I did that was not supposed to be pushed to the repo at all ended up being pushed. Fortunately the merge changes are independent of Joe’s existing code on A so no major harm done.