Git shows differences in files, but won't merge them

diff, git, merge

Solution

The merge command is telling you that your current branch contains all of the commits from the `stage/master` branch, but not the reverse. It is likely that your current branch contains changes which aren't in `stage/master` and it is those changes which are being reflected in your diff command.

 a-b----c
    \
     d--e

With the above repository if I have `e` checked out, trying to merge `b` will correctly state that things are up to date. But asking for differences between my current state and that same point, it's likely that differences will be present (not guaranteed, `e` could revert the changes from `d` or both `e` and `d` could be empty commits).

BTW, your diff command is somewhat incorrect. The `..` in front of the branch name causes that to be interpreted as a range of commits (equivalent to `HEAD..stage/master`), but diff operates on individual commits rather than ranges. This is a somewhat common mistake so diff has been adjusted to somewhat allow for it, but it can still give misleading results. In this case it will show changes reversed from what you'd likely expect showing the changes needed to go from your current state to `stage/master` rather than the changes that took place to bring the state from `stage/master` to the state reflected by the tip of your current branch. The latter is more likely be be what you were expecting.

Problem

I'm kind of stumped here. Git appears is both telling me that - There are differences between my current branch and the remote branch, and - There are no differences between my current branch and the remote branch One of these is a lie (or more likely, I'm misunderstanding this scenario). What's up with this?? ``` (~/hbb.vm) debian $ git diff ..stage/master --name-only sites/all/libraries/attachment_email/attachment_email.php sites/all/modules/redirect/redirect.module sites/all/modules/redirect/redirect.test sites/all/themes/HBB/css/elements.css sites/all/themes/HBB/templates/node--enterprise_blog.tpl.php (~/hbb.vm) debian $ git merge stage/master Already up-to-date. ```

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