fix: make git commands work

[Saransh-cpp]

Closes #243

[dpshelio]

When did the -a stopped working for needing to do the add first? In any case, I prefer that way and though this will be done, let's fix the rest to remove the -a from all the commits 😁

[dpshelio]

why do we need the amend here? Shouldn't need to, right?

[Saransh-cpp]

We'll either need amend or provide a commit message. I thought omitting the commit message was intentional. I usually commit my conflict resolves with "Resolve conflict" message; maybe I should do that here.

[dpshelio]

But git provides a default git message when creating a merge commit. Has git changed the default of merges that may not be trying a merge commit but something else?

[Saransh-cpp]

IIRC, that is the case only when there are no conflicts. I might be wrong here, but I think the default message is provided when the merge is possible without conflicts (and there is no fast forwarding). Is this the case or was it different at the time of writing the course?

[dpshelio]

In my new installed laptop without any configuration beyond author name it does create the message

https://asciinema.org/a/5xpZElfdDxq8rsze1rHEHSBRp

[Saransh-cpp]

Ah, I see. I had no idea this was possible, thanks! The command in the course is failing because it is not generating conflicts at all. Would it be possible to add ➕ me to https://github.com/UCL/github-example as well? It is a bit hard to work on the git pages locally, given that all push/pull commands fail because of access issues 😨

[dpshelio]

You've got access now... but I don't think you need it. Without looking into it in detail, I wonder if the problem is produce because git now requires setting the default action when pulling.

[Saransh-cpp]

git can really make you scratch your head sometimes. Turns out, the github-example repository had a legacy master branch (which was set as default), so whenever the lesson cloned the repo, it automatically used the master branch. But the lessons where we create a git repo locally, git uses the main branch. The conflicts did not show up because the commits were on 2 different branches.

Everything looks good now! 🫠

[Saransh-cpp]

When did the -a stopped working for needing to do the add first?

This is confusing to me as well. For some reason, git is considering %%writefile as removing the existing file and writing a new file with the same name. -a then does not work on untracked changes and the commit command errors out.

[dpshelio]

Amazing!