Question

I am setting my local branch to track remote branch like this:

$ git branch --set-upstream foo upstream/foo

But when I do git status, I get:

$ git status
# On branch foo
# Your branch and 'upstream/foo' have diverged,
# and have 108 and 43 different commits each, respectively.

What can I do to fix my local branch so that it no longer diverged with remote branch?
One idea I have is to delete my local branch and recreate another branch to track the same remote branch. Is there another way

Answer 1

You have two divergent lines of development. You have two choices:

• Abandon some of your changes, or
• Merge the two sets of changes

The first option is easy. Deleting your local branch and then checkout out a new local copy of the remote branch will accomplish this. You could also:

git reset --hard upstream/foo

The second option may require you to manually correct merge conflicts. In theory, simply running:

git pull

Should perform the merge, leaving you to clean up any conflicts.