Git rebase gets stuck after resolving merge conflict

Question

I'm running a rebase that hits a conflict:

$ git rebase master
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: Better `SelectMotifsView.js`
Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
M       browser/AddLinkView.js
M       browser/SelectMotifsView.js
M       browser/index.html
Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...
Auto-merging browser/index.html
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in browser/index.html
Failed to merge in the changes.
Patch failed at 0001 Better `SelectMotifsView.js`
The copy of the patch that failed is found in:
   /Users/dmitry/dev/links/.git/rebase-apply/patch

When you have resolved this problem, run "git rebase --continue".
If you prefer to skip this patch, run "git rebase --skip" instead.
To check out the original branch and stop rebasing, run "git rebase --abort".

No biggie—I had made a small change that I knew would cause a conflict:

diff --cc browser/index.html
index ba9c4f3,4c2a1c2..0000000
--- a/browser/index.html
+++ b/browser/index.html
@@@ -40,6 -40,7 +40,10 @@@
              <label>
                  <%= label %>
                  <select class="form-control" name="motif">
++<<<<<<< HEAD
++=======
+                     <% console.log(exclude); %>
++>>>>>>> Better `SelectMotifsView.js`
                      <% motifs.each(function(motif) { if (!exclude || exclude.indexOf(motif) < 0) { %>
                          <option value="<%= motif.get('id') %>"><%= motif.get('name') %></option>
                      <% } }); %>

I want to keep the version from HEAD, which is empty, so I go in and just remove the whole:

++<<<<<<< HEAD
++=======
+                     <% console.log(exclude); %>
++>>>>>>> Better `SelectMotifsView.js` 

I save the file, browser/index.html, then git add browser/index.html:

$ git add browser/index.html
$ git rebase --continue

But then:

Applying: Better `SelectMotifsView.js`
No changes - did you forget to use 'git add'?
If there is nothing left to stage, chances are that something else
already introduced the same changes; you might want to skip this patch.

When you have resolved this problem, run "git rebase --continue".
If you prefer to skip this patch, run "git rebase --skip" instead.
To check out the original branch and stop rebasing, run "git rebase --abort".

Never seen this before... git status shows no remaining unresolved paths. What to do? I read on other related questions that this may be a good use of --skip, but this doesn't seem to be a null commit. Or am I wrong?

Answer 1

Looks like the patch is empty, so you can safely skip it as git suggests:

$ git rebase --skip

Answer 2

One possible cause of a git rebase being stuck in a "rebase loop" is git gc.
This is fixed in git 2.7.1 (February 6th, 2016)

See commit 8c24f5b (13 Jan 2016) by Jeff King (peff).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit eefc461, 26 Jan 2016)}

rebase: ignore failures from "gc --auto"

After rebasing, we call "gc --auto" to clean up if we created a lot of loose objects. However, we do so inside an &&-chain. If "gc --auto" fails (e.g., because a previous background gc blocked us by leaving "gc.log" in place), then:

1. We will fail to clean up the state directory, leaving the user stuck in the rebase forever (even "git am --abort" doesn't work, because it calls "gc --auto"!).
2. In some cases, we may return a bogus exit code from rebase, indicating failure when everything except the auto-gc succeeded.

We can fix this by ignoring the exit code of "gc --auto".

So to fix you just need to remove gc.log:

rm .git/gc.log