CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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sergioBsns
sergioBsns

Reputation: 71

Upon $ Git checkout branchName, all changes (committed or not/ staged or not) appear on branch switched

Git / branch weird behavior

Recently, I had to recover my computer and reinstalled ALL software again.

Git is behaving in a manner I am not familiar with.

I did

$ git init
$ git branch -b newBranch
$ git checkout newBranch

After this I did some changes to a couple of files and added a new file.

I DID NOT $ git add -A NOR $ git commit -m 'msg'

Upon,

$ git checkout master

all changes made on newBranch reflect on master:

Upon,

$ git status

all changes show up as un-staged (in red).

Previously, whenever I switched to a branch and did some changes, upon switching to another branch, I would NOT be able to see those changes anymore (staged/un-staged or committed/un-committed).

And only upon running

$ git merge sourceBranch destinationBranch

would those changes show on the other branches. This seems not to be the case

with my Git.

Is it

Upvotes: 1

Views: 80

Answers (4)

sergioBsns
sergioBsns

Reputation: 71

Previous installation misled me as to actual commands and Git capabilities. Must read docs thoroughly.

Upvotes: 0

Gauthier
Gauthier

Reputation: 41975

Short answer: your local changes are not tracked by git until you add or commit them. If you switch branch without adding or committing, git does not overwrite these local changes, so you don't lose data too easily.

There are three separate domains:

  • your local files (L)
  • the staging area (S)
  • the repository (R)

You have made changes in L. These do not reflect in S nor R, the domains are separated. If you haven't told git to add (to S) or commit (to R), your changes in L do not belong to any branch yet, only to the L domain.

When you checkout branches, from and to master and newBranch, git changes the current HEAD, that is were local changes would be introduced into S or R, if you were to add or commit.

When you checkout branches, git also attempts to reflect the checked out commit (which is the one at the tip of the branch you check out) onto the file system, domain L. But, to prevent shooting yourself in the foot and losing unstaged and uncommited changes in L, git does not overwrite these L changes. Since they're not added or commited, you couldn't retrieve them otherwise.

Note: you may tell git to overwrite such local changes, by passing the -f (force) flag to checkout. You'd lose your local changes without warning.

Note also: switching branch while having local changes is not always possible, for example if the branch being changed to would apply changes that would overwrite some of your local changes. This is where I most often use -f, when I know I want to lose the local changes.

This answer (mine) might help: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2569513/108802

Upvotes: 1

dogstring
dogstring

Reputation: 11

It's not broken or anything try adding those unstage and commit again.

Upvotes: 0

Maroun
Maroun

Reputation: 95978

So you're now working on newBranch branch, you made changes but didn't commit anything yet.

Why it's allowed to checkout the master branch?

Git allows that because switching to it won't override any of your local changes.

However, if you're now working on master branch and change some files, Git will prevent you from doing that because local changes would be overwritten.

Upvotes: 0

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