Git - Switching branches (windows) & uncommitted changes

Question

I'm having a hard time understanding some git/DCVS concepts. Here's what happened:

1. I created a git project, and imported it from an SVN repo
2. I made some commits
3. I wanted to experiment something, so I created a branch called constants-update
4. I switched to constants-updatebranch, moved some files, deleted others and added many more
5. I committed to this branch
6. Now I'm trying to switch to my master branch using git checkout master
7. I got this error: error: You have local changes to 'src/groovy/Constants.groovy'; cannot switch branches.

My understanding of DCVS is that I can switch branches at will, even if some branch has more or less files than the others, as long as I commit my files. I've tried committing with git commit -a and switching to master branch, but I have the same error.

As a side note, when I commit git warns me that LF will be replaced by CRLF and warns me about some trailing whitespaces also; after I commit I do a git status and a bunch of files always appear as #modified ....

Is this related to git/windows, or I do not understand correctly what it is supposed to happen? I just want to switch to my master branch without losing my changes in the other branch.

Answer 1

I solved the problem hacking my pre-commit hook (commenting these lines in .git/hooks/pre-commit with a #):

#       if (/\s$/) {
#       bad_line("trailing whitespace", $_);
#       }