git continues to confuse me with its unhelpful error warnings This one really deserves a prize:
git merge is not possible because you have unmerged files
My situation: My master branch on github was edited (directly in the browser) while my local master branch was also edited.
I wrongly suppose you could simply merge the two versions and be done with it, but also, I cannot merge - because my files are unmerged.
git merge remote/master
results in
error: merge is not possible because you have unmerged files.
hint: Fix them up in the work tree, and then use 'git add/rm <file>'
hint: as appropriate to mark resolution and make a commit.
fatal: Exiting because of an unresolved conflict.
So, after adding and committing the local change and then trying to merge again, I get:
merge: remote/master - not something we can merge
Clearly I am missing something essential here... Do I have the wrong idea about what merging means? How do I fix this issue of having a different remote master / local master branch?
The error message:
merge: remote/master - not something we can merge
is saying that Git doesn't recognize remote/master. This is probably because you don't have a "remote" named "remote". You have a "remote" named "origin".
Think of "remotes" as an alias for the url to your Git server. master is your locally checked-out version of the branch. origin/master is the latest version of master from your Git server that you have fetched (downloaded). A fetch is always safe because it will only update the "origin/x" version of your branches.
So, to get your master branch back in sync, first download the latest content from the git server:
git fetch
Then, perform the merge:
git merge origin/master
...But, perhaps the better approach would be:
git pull origin master
The pull command will do the fetch and merge for you in one step.