Why local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge?

Question

I have changes to Makefile in different places.

Why I still get error?

$ git stash pop
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
    Makefile
Please commit your changes or stash them before you merge.
Aborting
The stash entry is kept in case you need it again.

My changes are not intersect. So I expect they should be merged without any problem.

Answer 1

There are technical issues, which prevent git stash pop to use the index as freely as other commands (since it actually modifies the index itself), and to avoid a complicated logic around the stash apply mechanism, to this point, git stash pop simply refuses to apply changes on an "unclean" file.

---

The simple way around this is to create a commit with said files :

git add Makefile
git commit -m "wip"
git stash pop

# ... fix stuff if needed ...

# after stash application : you can jump one commit backwards
git reset --soft HEAD^   # if you want to keep stuff in the index
git reset HEAD^          # if you can reset the index too