Git merge reports Already up-to-date though there is a difference

Question

I have a git repository with 2 branches  master and test   There are differences between master and test branches   Both branches have all changes committed   If I do    git checkout master git diff test   A screen full of changes appears showing the differences  I want to merge the changes in the test branch and so do   git merge test  But get the message  Already up-to-date   However  examining files under each different branch clearly shows differences   What s the problem here and how do I resolve it

User · Answer

If merging branch A into branch B reports "Already up to date", reverse is not always true. It is true only if branch B is descendant of branch A, otherwise branch B simply can have changes that aren't in A.

Example:

You create branches A and B off master
You make some changes in master and merge these changes only into branch B (not updating or forgetting to update branch A).
You make some changes in branch A and merge A to B.

At this point merging A to B reports "Already up to date" but the branches are different because branch B has updates from master while branch A does not.

User · Answer

I had the same problem  I had changes in the remote and it was still showing  Already up to date   Recloning the repository fixed the problem for me

User · Answer

A merge is always between the current HEAD and one or more commits  usually  branch head or tag     and the index file must match the tree of HEAD commit  i e  the contents of the last commit  when it starts out    In other words  git diff --cached HEAD must report no changes        The merged commit is already contained in HEAD  This is the simplest case  called  Already up-to-date     That should mean the commits in test are already merged in master  but since other commits are done on master  git diff test would still give some differences

User · Answer

This happened to me because strangely GIT thought that the local branch was different from the remote branch  This was visible in the branch graph  it displayed two different branches  remotes origin branch name and branch name   The solution was simply to remove the local repo and re-clone it from remote  This way GIT would understand that remotes origin branch name and branch name are indeed the same  and I could issue the git merge branch name   rm  lt my repo gt  git clone  lt my repo gt  cd  lt my repo gt  git checkout  lt branch name gt  git pull git checkout master git merge  lt branch name gt

User · Answer

What works for me  let s say you have branch1 and you wanna merge it into branch2   You open git command line go to root folder of branch2 and type   git checkout branch1 git pull branch1 git checkout branch2 git merge branch1 git push   If  you have comflicts you don t need to do git push  but first solve the conflits and then push

User · Answer

This often happens to me when I know there are changes on the remote master  so I try to merge them using git merge master  However  this doesn t merge with the remote master  but with your local master   So before doing the merge  checkout master  and then git pull there  Then you will be able to merge the new changes into your branch

User · Answer

This happens because your local copy of the branch you want to merge is out of date   I ve got my branch  called MyBranch and I want to merge it into ProjectMaster     gt git status On branch MyBranch-Issue2 Your branch is up-to-date with  origin MyBranch-Issue2    nothing to commit  working tree clean    gt git merge ProjectMaster Already up-to-date    But I know that there are changes that need to be merged    Here s the thing  when I type git merge ProjectMaster  git looks at my local copy of this branch  which might not be current   To see if this is the case  I first tell Git to check and see if my branches are out of date and fetch any changes if so using  uh  fetch   Then I hop into the branch I want to merge to see what s happening there       gt git fetch origin    gt git checkout ProjectMaster Switched to branch ProjectMaster   Your branch is behind  origin ProjectMaster  by 85 commits  and can be fast-forwarded       use  git pull  to update your local branch    Ah-ha   My local copy is stale by 85 commits  that explains everything   Now  I Pull down the changes I m missing  then hop over to MyBranch and try the merge again     gt git pull Updating 669f825  5b49912 Fast-forward    gt git checkout MyBranch-Issue2 Switched to branch MyBranch-Issue2 Your branch is up-to-date with  origin MyBranch-Issue2      gt git merge ProjectMaster Auto-merging Runbooks File1 ps1 CONFLICT  content   Merge conflict in Runbooks Runbooks File1 ps1  Automatic merge failed  fix conflicts and then commit the result    And now I have another issue to fix

User · Answer

git merge origin master instead git merge master worked for me  So to merge master into feature branch you may use   git checkout feature branch git merge origin master

User · Answer

Silly but it might happen  Suppose your branch name is prefixed with an issue reference  for example  91-fix-html-markup   if you do this merge     git merge  91-fix-html-markup   it will not work as intended because everything after the   is ignored  because   starts an inline comment   In this case you can rename the branch omitting   or use single quotes to surround the branch name  git merge   91-fix-html-markup

User · Answer

happend to me and was sent to this page  not sure if I had the same scenario  but mine was me trying to  re-merge  that  test  branch   So I previously merged it but I intentionally exclude some specific changes during that merge  so it clearly has some diff between branches  I was then trying to re-merge it because I realize forget that I should have and wanted to add a particular change file that I have previously excluded and I was hoping if I do a merge again would show all changes that I excluded before  but I was wrong and I get the  Already up-to-date  message instead   Upon reading  Bombe s comment answer  he is right  and git I think behaves that way  so what I did was to make hard backup of the files on test branch  then checkout the master branch and manually paste the files in it and commit it as if it was new changes   am not sure if this is the right way or could help others having this same issue  but it did provide solution to my particular case

User · Answer

Faced this scenario using Git Bash  Our repository has multiple branches and each branch has a different commit cycle and merge happens once in a while  Old Branch was used as a parent for New Branch Old Branch was updated with some changes which required to be merged with New Branch Was using below pull command without any branch to get all sources from all branches   git pull origin  Strangely this doesn t pull all the commits from all the branches  Had thought it so as the indicated shows almost all branches and tags  So to fix this had checked out the Old Branch pulled the latest using  git checkout Old Branch git pull origin Old Branch  Now checked out New Branch  git checkout New Branch  Pulled it to be sure  git pull origin New Branch git merge Old Branch  And viola got conflicts to fix from Old Branch to New Branch    which was expected

User · Answer

The same happened to me  But the scenario was a little different  I had master branch  and I carved out release 1  say  out of it   Made some changes in release 1 branch and merged it into origin  then I did ssh and on the remote server  I again checkout out release 1 using the command git checkout -b release 1 - which actually carves out a new branch release   from the master rather than checking out the already existing branch release 1 from origin  Solved the problem by removing  -b  switch

User · Answer

Say you have a branch master with the following commit history   A -- B -- C -- D  Now  you create a branch test  work on it  and do 4 commits                     E -- F -- G -- H                   A -- B -- C -- D   master s head points to D  and test s head points to H   The  Already up-to-date  message shows up when the HEAD of the branch you are merging into is a parent of the chain of commits of the branch you want to merge  That s the case  here  D is a parent of E   There is nothing to merge from test to master  since nothing has changed on master since then  What you want to do here is literally to tell Git to have master s head to point to H  so master s branch has the following commits history   A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H  This is a job for Git command reset  You also want the working directory to reflect this change  so you ll do a hard reset   git reset --hard H

User · Answer

Be sure to checkout the branch you want to merge first and then pull it  so your local version matches the remote version     Then checkout back to your branch you want to do the merge on and your git merge should work

User · Answer

The message    Already up-to-date    means that all the changes from the branch you   re trying to merge have already been merged to the branch you   re currently on  More specifically it means that the branch you   re trying to merge is a parent of your current branch  Congratulations  that   s the easiest merge you   ll ever do      Use gitk to take a look at your repository  The label for the    test    branch should be somewhere below your    master    branch label   Your branch is up-to-date with respect to its parent  According to merge there are no new changes in the parent since the last merge   That does not mean the branches are the same  because you can have plenty of changes in your working branch and it sounds like you do     Edit 10 12 2019    Per Charles Drake in the comment to this answer  one solution to remediate the problem is   git checkout master git reset --hard test   This brings it back to the  test  level    Then do   git push --force origin master   in order to force changes back to the central repo

[git] Git merge reports "Already up-to-date" though there is a difference

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