When running git reset --hard, the staged changes persist. Same goes for git checkout and git stash + git stash drop. What's going on?

Question

So here's some background: I'm trying to move a repository from Mercurial to git using hg-fast-export and when I do the last step (git checkout HEAD) there are still changes that persist in the repository. Specifically, it says that there are 4 deleted files that shouldn't be deleted.

When I try the following, nothing changes:

git reset --hard HEAD, git checkout ., git stash && git stash drop.

One thing I noticed is odd was that when someone was using this Mercurial repo, they added a git repo right in the middle of it T_T. So the interesting thing is when I run git checkout HEAD (but not when I run git checkout .), the .git subdirectory appears as deleted in the index (weird). These changes disappear whenever I run git reset but not without a bunch of errors flying past about an Invalid path.

Finally, that leaves the repository in the same state it was in when I first ran git checkout HEAD. (At least git's consistant!).

Surely a subset of the people converting mercurial to git has experienced this. Can anybody share their experiences with changes persisting within git?

Answer 1

The cause of this problem was indeed the fact that there was a .git directory inside the mercurial repository.

The way I solved it was running hg convert with a filemap excluding the trouble directory before doing the fast export conversion.

Hope this helps someone in the future!