Why do I sometimes see an “Entry 'filename' not uptodate. Cannot merge.” after a 'git reset --hard' and a 'git pull'?

Question

Occasionally, when I do the following...

git reset --hard
HEAD is now at 0123abde comment is here

git pull
Updating 0123abde..456789fa

I get the error...

error: Entry 'filename' not uptodate. Cannot merge.

The only workaround I have found is to 'git reset --hard', delete the offending file(s) then do 'git pull'. That doesn't seem right to me. Shouldn't a hard reset remove any and all local changes thus allowing me to pull the latest without any merge issues? Am I using git wrong? :)

This is on a CI machine so any changes here are unwanted. I'm using git version 1.6.1.9.g97c34 on Windows Vista.

Answer 1

The general idea behind "Entry 'filename' not uptodate. Cannot merge." is:

You have changes to files in your working directory that will be overwritten, removed or otherwise lost if the checkout and change to the new branch were to proceed.

It has been reported that this message could be "spurious" at time, (potentially because "git pull" did not refresh the index before trying to merge) but the fix was in Git1.6.1.
However, it may still be in mSysGit 1.6.1, so do you see the same error with a more recent mSysGit version ? (like 1.6.3)

Answer 2

I was having the same issue and I renamed the file which was causing this and did a git pull. It pulled that missing file and fixed the issue.

Answer 3

The easiest solution I have found to this problem is:

git add .
git merge --abort

Answer 4

I had this same issue when I was trying to run

git merge --abort

To get it to work, I staged the changes I didn't want. Once I did that, git was able to successfully undo them.