Normalize line endings
The change that is in the modification is deleting all lines and adding them again.
This is because the newlines are being changed between the committed files and the files on disk.
Github has a handy page detailing how to deal with this kind of problem, in brief (for linux/OSX), step one is to change your git config so it sorts out the line endings for you:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
Then commit line-endings normalization:
git rm --cached -r .
# Remove everything from the index.
git reset --hard
# Write both the index and working directory from git's database.
git add .
# Prepare to make a commit by staging all the files that will get normalized.
# This is your chance to inspect which files were never normalized. You should
# get lots of messages like: "warning: CRLF will be replaced by LF in file."
git commit -m "Normalize line endings"
# Commit
And then, line endings should be handled correctly. See the help page on github for more information, or the relevant section of the git docs formatting and whitespace.
Resolving linux-machine conflicts
the staging server is locked because it won’t pull new edits.
The error message reads “Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:”, that means they contain local changes which should either be committed or discarded before continuing. Assuming normal usage for the staging server (it doesn’t have any intentional changes) the local changes can be discarded. For example do the following:
$ git fetch origin
# Retrieve updates
$ git reset --hard origin/master
# Forcibly change the current branch to match origin/master
This will retrieve the repository history, without updating the working copy, and then update to exactly match the master branch in the repository. Note that the last command will discard all uncommitted changes.