8  Common errors

8.1 Merge conflicts

  • These can happen if e.g.,

    • you forget to pull down the latest changes from GitHub (I find it’s easy to forget to do this in the morning)
    • if you’re working on a project with multiple people
      • you both create new branches
      • they send in their PR first and it’s merged
      • then you send in your PR which edits some of the same lines

  • Let’s say I made changes yesterday which I pushed to GitHub

    • The next day I restart work on a different computer, GitHub Desktop will show for example

  • But you forget to click “Pull origin”

  • If you make commits onto a branch on which there are not yet pulled commits on GitHub you’ll get a merge error when you eventually click “Pull origin”

  • You could resolve conflict e.g., in VSCode

  • We can see this can happen when we see both up and down arrows in Pull origin box (but not always)

  • Fix

    • Move your changes to a new branch

    • Move back to master/main and revert/undo the changes there, then edit the files so they show no changes

    • Pull down the changes from GitHub to the relevant branch

    • Merge changes from your new branch into the main/master/relevant branch

  • See the GitHub documentation for more information about merge conflicts

8.2 No content changes found

  • If you see the following message from Git that a file has changed but there are No content changes found

  • This is most likely caused by working with colleagues using different operating systems, because they save text files with different line ending characters (CRLF on Windows, LF on macOS/Linux/Unix)

  • You can usually simply right click on the offending file in GitHub Desktop and Discard changes

  • Additionally you can set the following option at the top of your .gitattributes file

    # Auto detect text files and perform LF normalization
* text=auto