Merging master into devel branches....

So I found that I had made changes to devel but I was using an old branch of devel that was different from the master.

This was not ideal so I tried to "Update from Master" using Github Desktop.
This created conflicts in DESCRIPTION, NEWS and README.Rmd.

To resolve the conflicts, I opened the files in R-Studio and edited them in the way I thought was necessary using advice from here:
https://help.github.com/articles/resolving-a-merge-conflict-using-the-command-line/

Then I used git add, i.e. git add DESCRIPTION after the file was updated to resolve the conflict and the conflict markers.

Finally I typed: 

git commit -m "Updating devel from master and resolving conflicts"

to resolve the whole thing. 

This allowed me to update devel all from master and only has the changes in the devel since I started working on it this month (August)

All in all a successful use of Git, I think.