title: git pull with local changes
body: <p>I have a development clone and a live clone of a git repository, pushing from development and pulling to live. I'm having a problem in that configuration files need to be changed once they get to the live working copy. This was all working fine until I changed the structure of one of my configuration files - when I went to pull it down, there were 2 problems:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>my configuration file wasn't up-to-date, so the changes couldn't be pulled to that particular file (I was expecting that things would just be merged)</li>
  <li>I then tried to git pull again, and saw that everything was up-to-date, when viewing the file showed that it clearly wasn't up-to-date.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>There's probably something fundamental I'm not understanding about how git works - is it best to create a live branch for modifying configuration files, then merging after pulling to master, or is there a way around this I'm not seeing?</p>