git - Why reset --hard seems to be always needed

Question

When working on two workstations (say one from the office, one from home) on the same git project, after committing/pushing from one and trying to pull from the other (say the next day), branch seems always to be out of sync after

git pull --all

and the solution proposed here is needed.

Why is that? (I never do a forced push as implied in the above post).

Answer 1

The safest way to handle git repositories from getting corrupted due to some dangling heads or forced push is to use the following:

git fetch
git rebase origin/your_branch

git pull by default fetches and then merges instead of rebasing.

Difference between merge and rebase can be found here: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing/conceptual-overview

What you should do now is remove the repo from both of your workstations(obviously after committing and pushing all the local changes). Clone it again. Create a local tracking branch for 'your_origin_branch'. And follow the above procedure to make changes henceforth.