Re: make update error

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Thomas S. Dye <tsd@tsdye.com> wrote:

> Aloha all,
> 
> Apologies in advance for a question well below the prevailing software  
> expertise on this list and somewhat off topic.  I looked around for an  
> answer to this with no luck.
> 
> I'm trying to update the org-mode installation on my Mac, like this:
> 
> sudo make update
> 
> git pull counts, compresses, receives objects, resolves deltas,  
> updates and fails with this message:
> 
> error: Entry 'Makefile' not uptodate. Cannot merge.
> 
> As far as I know Makefile is up-to-date.
> 

You probably changed it without realizing it. If you don't care about
the changes (you can check with "git diff": it will tell you what's
different between your repository and the working tree), you can
checkout the original version of the Makefile and then do the pull:

   git checkout Makefile
   git pull

This will probably do it, but if worse comes to worse, you can always
just throw away the whole repository and start from scratch:

   git clone git://repo.or.cz/org-mode.git .


You might also want to have a local branch, where you can keep any local
modifications, e.g. if the changes to the Makefile were deliberate and
you wanted to keep them, then you could save the Makefile temporarily
(mv Makefile /tmp/Makefile), do the above commands, then create the local branch:

   git branch local

change to it:

   git checkout local

(note that checkout has a couple of related but different meanings).
Move the modified Makefile back and commit the changes:

   mv /tmp/Makefile .
   git commit -a

When it it time to pull again, you can change back to the (pristine)
master branch and pull:

   git checkout master
   git pull

Then you can rebase your local changes on top of the new bits:

   git rebase master local

It's a good way to keep a few local modifications and carry them forward
to any new version of org (of course, if the new version and your changes
change the same area of a file, you might end up with merge conflicts that
you'll have to resolve: but most of the time, it just works).

HTH,
Nick