Why does my repo always have a mystery new commit to pull?

Question

Hi,

I'm on a Mac (OS X 10.9.2) using SourceTree 1.8.1. I make my initial local commits using Eclipse 3.8.2 with the Eclipse EGit plugin. Then I push those upstream using SourceTree.

I have several repos that, even though I am the only developer working on them, almost every time I go to push my commit changes upstream, SourceTree tells me that I have 1 new commit to pull first. Why does that happen?

When I do the pull, it almost always says "Already up to date. Merge completed by recursive strategy."

On a similar vein, if I have a file that I make edits to AND rename the file, all before committing the file, the same thing happens (1 new commit to pull), except I almost always get a merge conflict. In this case, it seems like Git or ST get confused, and try to make me pull down the "missing" file, that I am about to delete/rename with my next commit.  I usually just "resolve the conflict using Mine", commit the change, then I can push my changes.

Could I be doing something better to avoid these issues?  And I'd really like to know where / why the mystery pull happens for just a set of changes.

Seth · Answer

I've never seen the behavior you described, so I can't really speculate. Using the shell will help determine whether the confusion is within SourceTree, or is between the server and the Git client.

Maybe someone who knows more about bitbucket can comment.

Phillip Molaro1 · Answer

Seth,

I haven't tried via the command line. Since my team added Sourcetree to the mix I haven't used the shell much.  I can try the next time I havw ths case and see what happens. Could you speculate either way?  I assume the same will happen.

We push to a BitBucket account.

- Phillip

Seth · Answer

Do you get the same errors if you try pushing from the command line? Is your remote another server running a standard Git install, or is it some sort of 3rd party hosting (Bitbucket, GitHub, etc)?