How to merge old version of file with new version?

Question

I had edited a file and pushed it to the repository. Another developer did not pull the repository files to his tree and edited the file and pushed it to the repository, over-writing my changes. How do I merge both versions or access both so I can merge them manually?

Tim Crall1 · Answer

If he did do a force push and thus your commit is gone altogether on the remote server but still present on your local clone, you probably want to do something where you create a branch on your local clone, pull his changes into that branch, and then merge the two branches.

Tim Crall1 · Answer

If your commit is still there, you should be able to do this 1) Checkout your commit 2) Create (and checkout) a branch at that commit 3) Make an inconsequential change to the code (maybe add a blank line somewhere) 4) Stage and commit the change 3) Checkout the original branch ("master" or whatever branch you were both committing to in the first place) 4) Merge the branch you created into the current branch 5) If necessary, resolve any conflicts 6) If you had to resolve conflicts, stage and commit the changes. At command line, it would look like this: git checkout git checkout -b git commit -a -m "creating a branch to merge from" git checkout master git merge git commit -a You can of course follow the same steps in SourceTree.

Tim Crall1 · Answer

It's possible that the second developer actually did overwrite the commit if he did a  "force push" (push -f)

You should almost never do a  force push and many people configure their repos to disallow them (I know you can do this on Stash, I don't know about BitBucket but I would guess you could).