Re: Switching branches not working in a cloned repo

[Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 6:58 AM, Paul Williamson
<paul.williamson@mediamiser.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We use git extensively on a number of repos. Recently, we have had a problem with one of them. This repo has a 'web_dev' branch. For copies of the repo cloned before a certain (recent but unidentified) time, we could 'git checkout' between master and web_dev and everything would be normal.
>
> However, now if we clone the repo, we can no longer do 'git checkout web_dev'. Git doesn't complain, in fact there is no feedback and we are still in the master branch. Running 'git branch -r' still shows the branch as existing at origin.
>
> If we try 'git branch web_dev' we then see web_dev listed locally and can switch to it BUT on closer inspection we realise that this action has created a new branch off master.
>
> The first time we saw this was under Bash on Windows, so we thought maybe it was a beta problem, but a) other repos work as expected under that environment, and b) under cygwin, pulling the same repo to a new directory alongside an older copy shows that the problem occurs with the new clone, but not the one that that was cloned longer ago.
>
> Also in this situation, there are no local outstanding code changes that might cause problems switching branches. This occurs right from a cleanly cloned repo.
>
> It seems something has gone wrong with this repo, and we don't know what. It's a tough problem to google, and I was not able to search the gmane archives (DNS errors).
>
> Any idea how to investigate?
>

Try a fresh clone with "git checkout --track origin/web_dev" and then
a "git status -v" and let us know what happens. I suspect that older
clones have the correct branches already setup for tracking, but the
new clone isn't doing it automatically, so when you run git checkout
web_dev you're just creating a new local copy.

You can probably fix this by running

git checkout web_dev
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/web_dev
git reset --hard origin/web_dev

The last command will completely reset your local web_dev to match
what's upstream, and the second command tells git that this branch
tracks a given remote branch.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Jake

> Thanks,
> Paul
>
>