Re: Possibly-spurious 'not uptodate. Cannot merge'

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk> writes:

> Recently (as of perhaps git 1.5.4?), whenever I update my l-k tree I get
> this:
> ...
> I suspect the 'problem' is that I've hardlinked a bunch of build trees
> to this tree in the interim via 'cp -al', then applied patches to each
> of those trees with quilt, then deleted all those trees prior to the git
> pull. This doesn't change the original files at all, but *does* update
> their link count: is git getting annoyed by the corresponding change in
> ctime? (If so, why did it start happening only fairly recently?)

In git timescale 1.5.4 is not recent at all ;-)

Ancient git, whose "git merge" was a scripted command, refreshed the index
before starting, but it lost that when the command was rewritten in C soon
after v1.5.6 by 1c7b76b (Build in merge, 2008-07-07), and nobody noticed
it until 76c3fb1 (Merge branch 'mv/merge-refresh', 2008-10-09).  In other
words, the tip of 'master' (and upcoming 1.6.1) already has the fix.

The fix should have been cherry-picked to 'maint' to be part of 1.6.0.X
series, but it apparently was forgotten.  Fault of mine and Shawn ;-)