Subject: Re: Bug? Git checkout fails with a wrong error message

From: Holger Hellmuth <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:07:19 +0100

On 15.01.2012 09:14, Yves Goergen wrote:
> On 13.01.2012 20:28 CE(S)T, Holger Hellmuth wrote:
>> Is it possible that Visual Studio changes them while you are comitting?
>
> No. Those files may only be modified while open.
>
>>> I renamed the file and created a new one with the same name. Is it so
>>> simple to crash the Git repository?
>>
>> Who said anything about crash? git simply doesn't care whether a change
>> is because of a rename. It isn't special or different to any change you
>> can make to a file
>
> Well, there is a tracked file about which Git says it's untracked. How
> would you describe such internal inconsistency? Maybe corruption would
> fit better.

The original point I was trying to make was that git rename is made out 
of the rather simple operations git add <newname> and git rm <oldname>. 
Not a seldom used function but the basic operations of the vcs. It must 
be one heck of a corner case or a bit flip in the hardware.

The most likely place where the corruption could be is the index. This 
is actually a simple file located in .git\ that can be recreated by 
deleting that file and doing "git reset". I would shut down tortoise-git 
(i.e. the explorer) before doing this and use the command line.