Git checkout: updating paths is incompatible with switching branches

Question

My problem is related to Fatal Git error when switching branch.

I try to fetch a remote branch with the command

git checkout -b local-name origin/rem         


        

Answer 1

After fetching a zillion times still added remotes didn't show up, although the blobs were in the pool. Turns out the --tags option shouldn't be given to git remote add for whatever reason. You can manually remove it from the .git/config to make git fetch create the refs.

Answer 2

For me what worked was:

git fetch

Which pulls all the refs down to your machine for all the branches on remote. Then I could do

git checkout <branchname>

and that worked perfectly. Similar to the top voted answer, but a little more simple.

Answer 3

Could your issue be linked to this other SO question "checkout problem"?

i.e.: a problem related to:

• an old version of Git
• a curious checkout syntax, which should be: git checkout -b [<new_branch>] [<start_point>], with [<start_point>] referring to the name of a commit at which to start the new branch, and 'origin/remote-name' is not that.
  (whereas git branch does support a start_point being the name of a remote branch)

Note: what the checkout.sh script says is:

  if test '' != "$newbranch$force$merge"
  then
    die "git checkout: updating paths is incompatible with switching branches/forcing$hint"
  fi

It is like the syntax git checkout -b [] [remote_branch_name] was both renaming the branch and resetting the new starting point of the new branch, which is deemed incompatible.

Answer 4

I believe this occurs when you are trying to checkout a remote branch that your local git repo is not aware of yet. Try:

git remote show origin

If the remote branch you want to checkout is under "New remote branches" and not "Tracked remote branches" then you need to fetch them first:

git remote update
git fetch

Now it should work:

git checkout -b local-name origin/remote-name

Answer 5

After having tried most of what I could read in this thread without success, I stumbled across this one: Remote branch not showing up in "git branch -r"

It turned out that my .git/config file was incorrect. After doing a simple fix all branches showed up.

Going from

[remote "origin"]
    url = http://stash.server.com/scm/EX/project.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

to

[remote "origin"]
    url = http://stash.server.com/scm/EX/project.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

Did the trick