Question

I have phabricator set up. Being relatively green with git, what’s the sane/proper way to make sure that I can have my own configuration files (and possibly some hacks in other files) coexist with what comes in from upstream?

Answer 1

Keep your changes on a separate branch. Let’s assume that you track the upstream changes in a vendor branch, and you work on the master branch. Then you would do something like this to bring in upstream updates:

• Switch to the vendor branch:

  git checkout vendor
  

• Pull in the new updates:

  git pull
  

• Switch to your master branch:

  git checkout master
  

• Merge the changes:

  git merge vendor
  

• Fix conflicts and commit.

Going into a little more detail…assume your upstream repository is
http://github.com/spiffy/project.git, and you want to track the master
branch. Clone the repository:

$ git clone http://github.com/spiffy/project.git
$ cd project

You want to track the upstream changes in a vendor branch and do
your own work in the master branch. Start by renaming the existing
master branch to vendor:

$ git branch -m master vendor

This preserves the configuration set up by the clone operation:

$ git config --get-regexp 'branch.vendor.*'
branch.vendor.remote origin
branch.vendor.merge refs/heads/master

And now create your master branch:

$ git checkout -b master

And have at it!