How does “not something we can merge” arise?

Question

This is a new one to me. I\'m a fairly experienced user of git, and have just added a remote to a repo that was forked from mine, fetched the updates and then tried to merge

Answer 1

I get the error if I use the wrong quotes (HEX UTF-8 bytes E2 80 9C and HEX UTF-8 bytes E2 80 9D) instead of the simple quote (HEX UTF-8 bytes 22) to enclose the commit message, see below.

Master@HP-ENVY-L MINGW64 ~/desktop/learning/git-practice/p_2 (master)
$ git merge feature-branch -m “Merge feature-branch into master”
merge: into - not something we can merge

Master@HP-ENVY-L MINGW64 ~/desktop/learning/git-practice/p_2 (master)
$ git merge feature-branch -m "Merge feature-branch into master"
Already up-to-date.

It happened because I copied and pasted the command from instructions instead of typing it in myself. The message git provides is rather unspecific.