DRAFT: Problem with unwanted commits

[JessicaLucindaCheng]

Disclaimer: Since I am not personally experiencing this problem, I can't tell you exactly why it is happening for each person. Also, why it is happening for each person can also be for different reasons and may not be covered below.

Troubleshooting unwanted/unexpected commits:

Problem: A person is finding commits from a pull request they reviewed in their branch or pull request.

• Possible explanation: It is possible that this is a result of already having a branch with the name and then copying and pasting the commands to review a pull request.
  • For example, these are the commands from this github-action bot (Update project details for lucky parking hackforla/website#3146 (comment)) in a pull request:

    git checkout -b macho-catt-3056-update-lucky-parking-prj gh-pages
    git pull https://github.com/macho-catt/website.git 3056-update-lucky-parking-prj
    

    • The first time I copy and paste this into the terminal area in VS Code it works fine.
    • However, if I don't delete the "macho-catt-3056-update-lucky-parking-prj" branch and then copy and paste it again in the terminal area again, I'll see "fatal: a branch named... already exists"; see the following for the full error message in context:
      Click here to see a screenshot of the full error message underlined in red

      
      This means that a new branch with that name wasn't created. It also means that it didn't switch branches either. Thus, if i just click enter to git pull, whatever I git pull will be in the branch I was previously. For example, if I was in my topic branch called "working-on-issue-branch", I would still be in that branch when I git pull and thus I pulled all the commits from the pr I am reviewing into my "working-on-issue-branch".
• Possible solution: After reviewing a pull request, delete the pull request branch created; thus, if I need to re-review the pull request, I can just use the commands without encountering the error mentioned above. Continuing from the example above, if I'm done reviewing the pull request, I would delete the branch "macho-catt-3056-update-lucky-parking-prj" by switching to another branch using git checkout and then using git branch -D macho-catt-3056-update-lucky-parking-prj to delete the branch.

Problem: A person is finding commits from past issues they've worked on.

• Possible explanation 1: The person made commits to their gh-pages (or feature branch if they are working off a feature branch such as feature-homepage-launch). In other words, their gh-pages is ahead, which means those "ahead" commits would show up every time they make a new branch based off gh-pages.

• Possible explanation 2: The person did https://github.com/hackforla/website/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIBUTING.md#27a-working-on-an-issue-1-verify-current-branch-is-gh-pages without doing this step first https://github.com/hackforla/website/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIBUTING.md#27b-working-on-an-issue-2-create-a-new-branch-where-you-will-work-on-your-issue.