Git push complaining about non-fast-forward, even though remote has been pulled

Question

I'm trying to push my changes to a repo on my NAS. It's failing in a way I don't understand.

The documentation states that by default push works only with fast-forward updates. Fair enough. So I do a git pull (my remote is called rubix):

D:\RoboCup\Dev\TinMan>git pull rubix master
From ssh://rubix/volume1/git/TinMan
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up-to-date.

All looks well. Let's try pushing...

D:\RoboCup\Dev\TinMan>git push rubix master
To ssh://dnoakes@rubix/volume1/git/TinMan
 ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast-forward)
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://dnoakes@rubix/volume1/git/TinMan'
To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected
Merge the remote changes before pushing again.  See the 'Note about
fast-forwards' section of 'git push --help' for details.

I've read through the documentation on git push but at this point I can't understand why I'm seeing this problem.

Here is some other contextual info:

D:\RoboCup\Dev\TinMan>git --version
git version 1.7.0.2.msysgit.0

D:\RoboCup\Dev\TinMan>git branch
* (no branch)
  master

That last line looks suspect. How can I not be on any branch? Note too that I have some untracked files and modifieds (unstaged) changes too.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Here's one way to get synced up.

First, Commit any changes, then use git log to note any commits you wanted to push.

Next reset your master to match the remote like this:

git checkout master
git reset --hard remotes/rubix/master 

Finally, cherry pick the commits you wanted to keep

Example:

git cherry-pick 111aaa111
git cherry-pick 123abc123

Now pushing should work.

git push rubix master