RE: pull failed - why should I receive this message.

["Randall S. Becker" <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On September 24, 2021 1:34 PM Scott Russell wrote:
>
>Thanks for your answer.   Is there not an option on the pull to have git to overwrite the existing files?
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
>Sent: Friday, September 24, 2021 1:29 PM
>To: Russell, Scott <Scott.Russell2@ncr.com>
>Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
>Subject: Re: pull failed - why should I receive this message.
>
>*External Message* - Use caution before opening links or attachments
>
>On Fri, Sep 24, 2021 at 10:08 AM Russell, Scott <Scott.Russell2@ncr.com> wrote:
>>
>> Files not previously in git were added to git.   Why should I have to manually delete them?
>> Why can git put not replace them?  They were untracked files that are now tracked  and so the git copy is desired.
>> We can't always know ahead of time what files may have been added elsewhere.
>
>To turn it around on you, you can't always know ahead of time what files may have been added elsewhere, so you can't be sure that your
>newly added untracked file locally will be safe from being overwritten during a pull. How upsetting if you sink 30 hours into newlib.cpp
>and then your teammate checks in their own newlib.cpp, and yours is overwritten without asking when you run 'git pull'.
>
>You might have some luck with the '--autostash' option, which would at least prompt you whether to get rid of things when trying to
>merge them back together during the automatic 'git stash pop' at the end. Or you could run 'git clean --force' to automatically delete any
>untracked files you might have - you could even alias yourself a command like 'git dangerous-pull' which runs 'git clean -f && git pull'.
>
>>
>>
>> We need the pull to work automatically.
>>
>> error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge:
>>         Staging/CADDApps/CADDUIHelper/Source/Release/CADDUIHelper.exe
>>         Staging/CADDApps/CADDUIHelper/Source/Release_Unicode/CADDUIHelper.exe
>>         Staging/CADDApps/InstallDriversPackage/Release/InstallDriversPackage.exe
>>         Staging/Common/NCRCommonCCLib/Source/Release/NCRCommonCCLibMsg.dll
>>         Staging/Devices/NFC/Elatec_RFIDReader/Bin/Director.exe
>>         Staging/Devices/NFC/Elatec_RFIDReader/Firmware/AppBlaster.exe
>>         Staging/Devices/NFC/Elatec_RFIDReader/Firmware/flash.exe
>>         Staging/Utilities64/SSPSWDriverInstaller/Bin/DIFxAPI.dll
>>         Staging/Utilities64/SSPSWDriverInstaller/Bin/DriverForge.v4.5.4.exe
>>         Staging/Utilities64/SSPSWDriverInstaller/Source/Release/SSPSWDriverInstaller.exe
>>         Staging/Utilities64/SSPSWDriverInstaller/Source/Release/SSPSWDriverInstallerMsg.dll
>>
>> Staging/Utilities64/SSPSWTaskMgr/Source/Release/SSPSWTaskMgr.exe
>
>Or better yet, you could avoid checking in compiled binaries like these and instead add them to your .gitignore, unless you really mean to
>update them every time someone makes some change. When checking in binaries, you should be aware of the additional disk overhead
>needed to do so and take a look at some options Git has to mitigate that overhead, like partial clone. However, in many cases the easiest
>way to mitigate that overhead is to simply not check in binaries unless you absolutely need them to be version controlled.
>
>- Emily

If you are scripting this, try using git clean -dxf and git reset --hard before running the pull.  That will clean the objects out of your working directory.

-Randall