Git pull results in “needs update” and files shown as modified

Question

Upon pull (into a clean production-type repo) all the changesets come across and cause the files to appear modified and needing a commit. The git log does not show the commits that should have caused these changes... the changes just pull without the log notes so it believes it's out of sync.

The result of the pull shows "needs update" messages for each file.

Answer 1

As illustrated in this Git project, this can happen when Git tries to adjust eol style for projects developed on Unix, and cloned on Windows:

via msysgit Troubleshooting

run command in git bash: git config --global core.autocrlf false if this is not done then git svn rebase reports "needs update" thinking that changes have been made to the source May run into troubles with the commit

See this SO answer for more.

Answer 2

How I got out of the mess:

As I kept pulling to test my solutions I had to make use of...

git reset --hard which moves you back to the most recent commit in the log.

git clean -fd which kills off the untracked files since the more recent commit in the log.

Eventually I decided I needed to change the offending settings file to chmod 777 and commit the permission change. Another option would have been to change Git into permission agnostic mode with git config core.filemode false Read more here: How do I make Git ignore file mode (chmod) changes?

Then I did a pull to merge the changes and have the log update along with the files, changed the permission of the offending file back to 644 and commit that... and pushed it back to the working master (glad that's allowed.)

Seems like this is a bug that having a permission failure allows the file changesets to be merged but the log history doesn't reflect the commits!!!

BTW: My git --version is git version 1.5.6.5