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I forked a project someorg/greatproject on github with branches:

* master
* dev

from my fork I made a branch of dev called my-patch. so me/greatproject has branchs:

* master
* dev
* my-patch

I sent in a pull request, the patch was accepted and merged into dev. great! some time later the upstream dev branch got more changes and I wanted to resync my fork with the up stream. I followed some directions (which I have since lost) everything looked okay so I pushed my synced repo back to github.

I came back today and I found out that i had mistakenly merged someorg's dev branch into my my-patch branch. worse yet git branch shows just

*my-patch

I found out I can checkout origin/dev and if I follow these directions How do I update a GitHub forked repository? I can also checkout upstream/dev, but in both cases that puts me into something called detached head mode, which I guess is bad or wrong or at least merits some weird warnings.

I want to get back to a state where my fork looks like the original, plus the history of my patch's development on the branch my-patch. Basically, the state I would have gotten had all branches (except my patch) in my fork stayed in lock step with the original repo.

How do I get there?

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user1816847
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1 Answers1

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The simplest way to get the main branch (master) up to date and keep your my branch untouched is:

Adding the original remote (you probably done this already)

git remote add originalproject <git@github.com:someorg/greatproject.git>

For a master update locally

git checkout master (if master is the main branch for the project)
git reset --hard originalproject/master

You master branch is up to date with the original project

If you want to update your branch to the version that you pushed through the pull request just do

git checkout my-branch (if master is the main branch for the project)
git reset --hard originalproject/my-branch

But you will loose any local changes you have currently. It seems you have done some irreversible changes to your local copy, so the best thing could be to delete the fork and re-fork, while keeping the local folder untouched so you can potentially copy some of the code you did recently to the new clone.

bitoiu
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