I get SVN, it works like the other non-open source change management systems I have worked with in the past. I rarely end up confused by what I see happening. But I guess I just don't understand Git. I have a fork of POI on Git Hub JMarkMurphy/poi that I have been keeping synced with the main apache/poi repository. I do that by creating a pull request and merge from apache/poi to JMarkMurphy/poi. I do not have any of my updates in there, just attempts to keep my fork up to date. At this point my JMarkMurphy/poi is 9 commits ahead of apache/poi. Each time I merge changes I get another commit ahead. Is this normal? Is there anything I can do to avoid this?
What I want to be able to do is make a branch for a change, and since I only work on this in fits and starts, merge in apache/poi commits, and then merge those with my branch to deal with anything that may conflict with my change, then finally merge my branch back to trunk. Is that reasonable? Then how do you go about making changes in the Git repository live? Do I have to export it from Git, and make an SVN change? How do you do that?
