Resolve conflicts

To update the local branch with changes from the remote repo, one does:

$ git pull

This may lead to error messages like:

$ git pull
Password: 
X11 forwarding request failed on channel 0
Updating 67cecbb..b41447b
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
	<someFile>
Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can merge.
Aborting

This happens because git wants to prevent you from losing local changes. There are 3 ways to resolve the conflicts:

$ git commit -m "a commit"

When I tried it, I got an error saying:

$ git commit -m "a commit"
On branch master
Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 1 commit, and can be fast-forwarded.
  (use "git pull" to update your local branch)

Not very helpful.

The next option is stash:

$ git stash

This command puts the local changes onto a stack. They can be retrieved by git stash pop. At this point it was possible to make the git pull.

The third option would have been to discard all local changes

$ git reset --hard

and then make the pull.