Git refusing to merge unrelated histories on rebase

Question

During git rebase origin/development the following error message is shown from Git:

fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories
Error redoing m         


        

Answer 1

I had the same problem. The problem is remote had something preventing this.

I first created a local repository. I added a LICENSE and README.md file to my local and committed.

Then I wanted a remote repository so I created one on GitHub. Here I made a mistake of checking "Initialize this repository with a README", which created a README.md in remote too.

So now when I ran

git push --set-upstream origin master

I got:

error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/lokeshub/myTODs.git'
hint: Updates were rejected because the tip of your current branch is behind
hint: its remote counterpart. Integrate the remote changes
(e.g. hint: 'git pull ...') before pushing again.
hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details.

Now to overcome this I did

git pull origin master

Which resulted in the below error:

From https://github.com/lokeshub/myTODs
branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories**

I tried:

git pull origin master --allow-unrelated-histories

Result:

From https://github.com/lokeshub/myTODs
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
Auto-merging README.md
CONFLICT (add/add): Merge conflict in README.md
Automatic merge failed;
fix conflicts and then commit the result.

Solution:

I removed the remote repository and created a new (I think only removing file README could have worked) and after that the below worked:

git remote rm origin
git remote add origin https://github.com/lokeshub/myTODOs.git
git push --set-upstream origin master