Re: git "cannot merge"

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Graham Percival wrote:

> I finally got git installed, cloned the repo, spent half an hour playing with
> "gitk", etc.  Then I made a few small changes, did "git commit" after each
> one.

Did you specify the files you want to commit? In contrast to CVS, git is 
more precise in this respect: you either have to pass all the filenames of 
the files-to-be-committed, or "-a" if you want _all_ dirty files.

> fatal: Entry 'Documentation/user/advanced-notation.itely' would be 
> overwritten by merge. Cannot merge.

This can mean two things:

1) you have Documentation/user/advanced-notation.itely in your current 
working directory, but _not_ in git. In this case, you have to remove the 
file first.

2) you have made uncommitted changes to that file (see my comment above). 
With git, you should have committed your changes before you try to merge. 
(There are tricks to merge without a commit, and there is experimental 
support in git since last week to do that without the tricks, but it sure 
would be easier to just commit first, and _then_ merge.)

Hth,
Dscho