Part 2 of Exercise 1

Most of you have now submitted biographies on GitHub - you can see the whole list here

so it’s time to ask you to do one more small thing for this first exercise. I’d like you to take a few minutes and think of what you found hardest the first time you used Git and GitHub, and add a couple of sentences to your post describing it. In my case, what I stumbled over what the fact that Git’s model of the world is very different from that of Subversion and Perforce (the two version control systems I’d used extensively before), so I kept trying to use it as if it was something else. What did you stumble over in this exercise (if it’s your first time using Git), or what do you remember stumbling over when you first picked it up (if it’s not)?

This exercise will also give you a chance to see what it’s like to merge changes to your files that someone else has made (in this case, me). I’ve added a question to the bottom of each biography that’s currently on the site. To get that change into the files on your machine, you will need to:

add the main repository as a remote,
pull my changes (and merge them to anything you’ve changed),
edit, and
push.

In more detail:

A remote is like a bookmark - it’s a short name recorded in one repository that points at another.
When you forked swcarpentry/training-course to create your_username/training-course and then cloned your_username/training-course to your desktop, the repository on your desktop automatically got a remote called origin pointing at your_username/training-course on GitHub.
To add another remote called upstream to your desktop repository that points at swcarpentry/training-course (the master copy on GitHub), you’ll need to do this:
```
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/swcarpentry/training-course.git
```
You only need to do this once per repository - Git remembers the remotes you set up.
After that, you can run this command to pull down changes from the master repository (the one owned by swcarpentry) into the repository on your desktop:
```
$ git pull upstream gh-pages
```
You do this every time you want to get changes.
If you have edited files locally and those same files have been changed in the master repository, Git will tell you that there are conflicts. You will need to edit the affected files to resolve them. If you haven’t done this before, your Git buddy can help you; if you don’t have a Git buddy, and want help with this, mail me and I’ll pair you with someone or help you myself.
Once you have made changes, you can ‘git push origin gh-pages’ and create a pull request just as you did before.

When you are answering the question, please let us know how much previous Git and GitHub experience you have - when we meet next week, I’m going to compare experience reports from people who have just encountered Git for the first time with those from people who have been using it for a while, and are remembering what it was like months or years ago. The differences between fresh and remembered are always interesting…