I work on a robotics team that uses code from the robotics competition leaders, but with our own modification made to the code. They pushed out an update to their code, but when I work on merging it into our code, GitHub wants to remove our modifications (because they are no in the head branch). What would be the best way to prevent this from happening.
Most of the changes work ok, but some I need to keep, like in the image I have attached below.
Git shouldn't "insists on removing them" but should instead report it as a conflict, which you should now resolve in the way you want. If you did some "bad things" earlier in the past, Git may be fooled by an odd history structure and may solve conflicts in a wrong way. Also, if you use rerere, then maybe it remembers some wrong merge snippets and they are now reused to skip past these conflicts. You may want to review and repair such things..
But, anyways, if git merge doesn't give you a chance to solve conflicts manually, you can always add a --no-commit --no-ff flags to git merge command, and after git merge you will be able to correct the files and commit the merge manually. After that it should be OK and future merges shouldn't have problems in this parts of this files.
..hm.. unless you are merging a separate repositories/branches which don't share any history. In your Git repo, you have your codebase based on their remote code, right? Or have you copied the code without tracking information? Or maybe you previously used squash merges to merge their changes in? Anyways, it should be reported as conflict. If it is - that's normal. Just solve the conflict.
