Managing local-only changes with git

Question

On my local branch, I have some personal (local-only) changes to a Makefile (just changing the path to the compiler). Obviously I don\'t want to commit those changes in as they

Answer 1

There are likely several ways to approach this problem, here's my thought.

Make a new makefix branch and commit the makefile there. Whenever you need to make the project, switch to that branch. You can work in master and just keep merging, or rebasing the makefix branch against master.

The general idea is that you're creating a branch containing your Makefile that is never pushed.

Personally I would rebase makefix against master so my Makefile changes always stayed ahead of the actual pushable code. It just feels cleaner in my head.

Code Example

git branch makefix
git checkout makefix

Make your changes to Makefile

git add Makefile
git commit -m "Add Local Makefile Changes to Compiler Path"

For every-day work

git checkout master
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master

git checkout makefix
git rebase master

It's long and ugly, so I hope someone else has a better way =]