Why does Git sometimes generate meaningless merge conflicts

Question

Quite frequently during rebases, Git generates a merge conflict like the following:

<<<<<<< HEAD
}
=======
}
>>>>>>> f192b7c... My commit description here

The two sections are, character-for-character, identical.

Is this a known bug? Using version 1.8.2 on OS X.

Answer 1

For me, this has always been a case of EOL character conflicts - i.e. CR vs LF vs CRLF. You may be using different tools or platforms that produce different line endings, especially if you're working on a team, and especially if you're using both Windows and Linux. Have a look at github's Dealing with line endings, and this comprehensive writeup on the old vs. new systems of handling things, and this SO link about core.whitespace.