Dropbox and "Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge"

[Yuri Kanivetsky <yuri.kanivetsky@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I've started to run into issues with git relatively recently. Let's
take the issue I'm experiencing at the moment. I'm trying to rewrite a
history (git rebase -i some-hash, move 4 commits up, rename the last 2
of them), and it fails to apply the next commit on the todo list after
these 4 (I've redacted the message):

[detached HEAD 1888888] name-3
 Date: Mon May 9 22:41:03 2022 +0300
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
[detached HEAD 00b5555] name-4
 Date: Sat Jul 23 13:19:42 2022 +0300
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
        some paths
Please commit your changes or stash them before you merge.
Aborting
hint: Could not execute the todo command
hint:
hint:     pick 8222222222222222222222222222222222222222 name-5
hint:
hint: It has been rescheduled; To edit the command before continuing, please
hint: edit the todo list first:
hint:
hint:     git rebase --edit-todo
hint:     git rebase --continue
Could not apply 8222222... name-5

The files it complains about, they're versioned, and they're not
changed when it stops. If I copy the repository (cp -r), and repeat
the steps, it sometimes succeeds, sometimes not. If I were to split it
into smaller steps I believe it would succeed. In other words I got
this message occasionally for no apparent reason. Usually it succeeds
if I simply repeat the steps. Sometimes I need to do it in smaller
steps.

First I thought it's an issue with vim-fugitive, but I can reproduce
it with git alone. The other culprits I can think of are magit (I
believe I used it with this repository), vim, and now that I think
about it... Dropbox? The repository is in a dropbox directory. I
understand that this is uncommon, but a couple of my repositories are
in a dropbox directory and I'd like to put the reasons aside. Can you
suggest what I can do to find the reason it fails? Do you know what
exactly triggers this message (the content changed, modification time,
ctime)?

I'm running Alpine Linux and git-2.36.1.

Regards,
Yuri