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Firstly like to mention that I have tried a few things from prior questions but none of them fit my scenario.

  1. This does not somehow "register" as a merge in gitlab. I concluded this because when I try to delete the branch after merge, git threw a warning. Of course I can force delete the branch but I would prefer to keep the merge history clean.
  2. This answer, afai understand, seems to be for sub repositories/modules which is not my setup here.
  3. Did not experiment with it to avoid any possible further inconsistency.

This is the scenario:

I have a repository in GitLab and I am trying to resolve a Merge Request i.e. merging the associated branch of the MR to master. After committing and pushing all the changes to the MR branch 19-some-function , I followed the instructions in Gitlab [4] to manually merge which results in a detached HEAD state.

$ git fetch origin

$ git checkout -b 19-some-function origin/19-some-function
fatal: A branch named '19-some-function' already exists.

$ git checkout origin/master
Note: switching to 'origin/master'.

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental 
[truncated]

$ git merge --no-ff 19-some-function
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 package-lock.json                                  |  55 +++++++
 package.json                                       |   1 +
 src/Common/Constants.js                            |   2 +-
 src/Common/utils.js                                |  23 +++

(as opposed to doing it by Gitlab MR page UI: "resolve WIP" > "Merge" by clicking the button which to be frank I am not sure what it does BHS. However must add, when I did use the UI, I did not get a detached HEAD) I am the only developer and there is no separate reviewer yet, so I do not know if Step 1 & 2 in the instructions are redundant (it attempts to create the MR branch. which makes sense for a reviewer but as a developer of the feature I already have the branch so git throws an error, seen above therefore did not make sense to run git fetch origin again before checkout).

How do I resolve this detached HEAD such that it is recorded as the merge of 19-some-function with master? Will question/answer (2) above help?

[4] MR branch is 19-some-function

Check out, review, and merge locally
×
Step 1. Fetch and check out the branch for this merge request
  git fetch origin
  git checkout -b 19-some-function origin/19-some-function

Step 2. Review the changes locally

Step 3. Merge the branch and fix any conflicts that come up
  git fetch origin
  git checkout origin/master
  git merge --no-ff 19-some-function

Step 4. Push the result of the merge to GitLab
  git push origin master
hyperbolicme
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    I don't know who wrote those instructions, but they're just wrong. It's not clear why they want you to create a local branch in step 1 (the only things that really matter are the commits) but the biggest problem is that step 3's middle command *guarantees* a detached HEAD, which makes step 4 pointless as written. Perhaps they meant you should `git checkout master`, but if so, that needs more attention; perhaps they meant that in step 4, you should use `HEAD:master`; one way or another, these instructions are wrong. – torek Jan 02 '20 at 07:03
  • ok.. probably worth letting Gitlab know this then. anyhow, how do i undo this and do a proper merge? Can I still do this? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5601931/what-is-the-best-and-safest-way-to-merge-a-git-branch-into-master – hyperbolicme Jan 02 '20 at 07:36

1 Answers1

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You set yourself on detached HEAD state when you ask to checkout origin/master. You are not checking out the local branch master, so you have to be put on detached HEAD. But that is ok. You could then merge the PR branch you want and then push to origin/master if you wanted to:

git push origin HEAD:master
eftshift0
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