Question

git version 1.7.7.4

I have two branches development and testing.

Originally testing was created from development.

I have only been working on testing. So now my testing branch has a lot of differences compared to development.

Because the testing now has my latest changes I want make development the same as testing.

So I did the following to merge them.

git checkout development
git merge -s recursive -Xtheirs testing

However, when I get the difference between the two branches. There are still a lot of differences.

So I decided to reset the development branch and try again by doing the following:

git merge testing

However, I still get the same differences.

If I try and merge again without reseting. I get already up-to-date.

Is there any way I can make the development branch the same as the testing branch?

Many thanks for any advice,

Answer 1

After merging development onto testing, development will gain all the changes from testing but testing will have none of the changes on development. The graph will look something like:

*   bc6339d - (HEAD, development) Merge branch 'testing'
|\
| * 588c9a3 - (testing) commit message
* | 2d484f2 - another commit

See that testing and development are on different revisions.

To merge them they have the same changes you could do:

git checkout development
git merge -Xtheirs testing
git checkout testing
git merge development

The graph should now look like:

*   bc6339d - (HEAD, testing, development) merge branch 'testing'
|\
| * 588c9a3 - commit message
* | 2d484f2 - another commit

If you want to keep them separate, do git merge --no-ff development.