I am new to git, so am a bit confused about merging and pushing. For a normal branch, I simply commit and push, buts lets say I've merged changes from branch1 to master, and now I want to push master, what will be the sequence? Should I just merge and then push or merge, commit and push?
Another confusing thing is that when I merge and push, although changes do appear in the github repository, as seen by logging into github, Tortoisegit doesn't really say anything about those changes. I mean it doesn't say how many files were modified and such. Why is that so?
If you merge, you would not need to commit again. The merged files were already committed on your branch1. After you merge into master you can just push. So the order looks like this:
branch1 -> make changes
branch1 -> stage changes
branch1 -> commit changes
master -> merge branch1
master -> resolve any conflicts, if necessary
master -> push to remote