Question

I’m working with a developer here who is seeing a weird issue that I’ve never encountered before. He’s working on a repository and needs to pull the latest changes from someone else before he can push. All of his changes are committed.

$ git pull
Cannot pull with rebase: You have unstaged changes.
Please commit or stash them.

Which seems reasonable enough until…

$ git status
# On branch master
# Your branch and 'origin/master' have diverged,
# and have 3 and 1 different commit each, respectively.
#
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

Say what?

I’ve tried git reset --hard HEAD before pulling, but the pull still fails.

Only one guy is seeing this and he’s on a Mac (OSX 10.6.8). Any ideas? I’m about to pull my hair out.

Answer 1

Instead of

git pull

try

git fetch
git rebase -p origin/master

If that doesn’t work you can try

git pull --no-rebase

How to check why this message occurs

Make sure you on a branch, not a detached head. Rebasing doesn’t work on a detached head.

Run the following commands, the result should be no output.

git update-index -q --ignore-submodules --refresh
git diff-files --ignore-submodules
git diff-index --cached --ignore-submodules HEAD --