Strange behaviour of Git: mysterious changes cannot be undone

Question

I am seeing a behaviour in Git which seems very mysterious to me. I keep a clone of the Linux repository from Github to play with Git locally. To be clear, I don\'t do much

Answer 1

The Linux source tree has filenames which differ in case only, which causes interesting failures on systems with case-insensitive filesystems.

You need a case-sensitive filesystem in order to work with the Linux source.

(include/linux/netfilter/xt_connmark.h and include/linux/netfilter/xt_CONNMARK.h are two different files in the Git repository, but only one can exist in your checkout at a time if your filesystem is case-insensitive.)

Answer 2

As @ephemient said, this is because case insensitive file system. And I guess you are using Mac's HFS?

For a simple solution on Mac, you can create a disk image, format the disk image with 'Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+':

hdiutil create -type SPARSE -fs 'Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+' -size 40g ~/git.dmg

Then mount the disk image by open ~/git.dmg.

And then do all git clone, git checkout operations in the mountable volumes.

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Or you need some third-party tool to convert HFS+ from case insensitive to case sensitive. As I know, some Mac Apps are made on case insensitive file systems, so some of them may failed to work if you do this convertion.

Answer 3

Try updating submodules. I've gotten some weird, somewhat similar issues when a submodule included in a repository has been updated. Doing git submodule update may do the trick.