Question

I simply want to edit some commits with git rebase -i HEAD~2 inside the current branch.
I use Ubuntu 10.10 and had to install gvim first to make the command work.
Afterwards, the command opens a gvim window with the normal rebase content.
But when I want to save the file gvim says

“.git/rebase-merge/git-rebase-todo” E212

[Cannot open file to write]

Also the rebase command finishes right after starting (with Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/master.).

• When doing the same command with sudo the rebase works, but afterwards it occurs that files are owned by root and I have no write permissions anymore.

• On my ArchLinux system gvim is opened directly in the terminal where I run git rebase -i and everything works.

• I tried different terminals (Gnome terminal, LXTerminal, XTerm) – always the same problem

What is the problem here and how to solve it? It should work without sudo.

Edit 1

• Some files in .git/... are owned by root and are read-only. All directories and files in the first level of .git/ are owned by me. With ls -l --recursive .git/ | grep root I tried to detect which files that are but the output does not give the paths of the files…
• Should all files in .git/ belong to the user? May this be the reason for the problem?

EDIT 2

• Even after changing ownership and write permissions of all files inside .git to user with sudo chown -R user:user .git/ and chmod u+w -R .git/ (ls -l now shows sth. like -rw-r--r-- 1 user user) the problem stays the same.

Answer 1

My solution was:

Run

$ git config --global core.editor "gvim -f"

First, I thought it was because my repository was on an ntfs drive so the file permissions wouldn´t work correctly. But even after mounting the drive with correct file permissions the problem stayed the same. Starting vim with the -f option helps (I read about other people solving it the same way), but I don´t know why.