What is the correct way to merge upstream without losing changes?

Question

I\'m in a bit of a pickle.

I started development on a fork of a repo a few months ago. I made some changes. I was about to push my code back to the master as a pull re

Answer 1

Ok, if your repo is fubar, then here's steps to recover:

$ git remote update     # make sure origin and upstream are up to date
$ git checkout master
$ git branch my_changes   # just to make sure my stuff isn't lost
$ git reset --hard upstream/master
$ git status
# On branch master
# Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 8 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.
#

Ignore that fast-forward crap, it won't help you, just reset the master.

$ git push origin +master   # now, fork matches upstream/master

Now, how to recover the previous work so it's reviewable?

$ git diff --no-ext-diff --no-prefix master..my_changes > patchfile
$ patch -p0 < patchfile   # apply the patchfile to master
$ git diff     # to verify patch visually.
$ rm patchfile   # clean up
$ rake spec      # verify that it really works.
$ git add .
$ git status     # double triple verify
$ git commit .
$ git push origin master

That sucked. I tried doing rebase, but it kept saying "no changes" and didn't ask me to check anything in? I'm pretty sure I don't understand what's going on here, which is why I posted my struggle so someone can explain how I could have avoided this mess and gotten from A to B more elegantly now that it's fully documented. I'm willing to chalk this up to git inexperience, but I figure that pulling changes should be a really common thing in git -- I must be missing something.