Unresolvable Git error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout

Question

I am using Git alone for my local software project in Visual Studio 2010. Recently I created a new branch to do a larger refactoring of one of the dialogue windows. I did the following modifications:

• Rename Form1 to Form1a (including all depending files)
• Add new Form1

I checked this change into the branch, say form-refactoring. Interestingly, Git didn't notice that I renamed the file Form1.cs into Form1a.cs and created a brand new, totally different Form1.cs, but instead it noticed a new Form1a.cs file and found a whole lot of differences between the previous and new Form1.cs files. This will of course lead to totally garbaged diffs, but I don't care in this case as long as all files are handled correctly in the end.

Then I switched back to master to do some other small changes. Nothing conflicting. Until now, everything worked fine.

Today, I wanted to switch back to my branch form-refactoring to continue that work. But all I get is the following message:

git.exe checkout    form-refactoring

Aborting
error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
Form1.Designer.cs
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.

What is that supposed to be? The mentioned file is not untracked. Neither in the master branch, nor in the form-refactoring branch. It is part of both branches, but one is not a descendent of the other. What would happen if I delete it, is it gone for good then? I don't trust Git to bring back the correct file if I delete something now. I did not play with any file at all outside of my mentioned Git operations, so why should I play around with any file to continue using Git operations now? Git broke it, Git's supposed to handle it now!

Right now, I cannot continue with my work because I cannot switch branches. Is there an easy solution to this?

Git version is 1.7.6, TortoiseGit is 1.7.3.

Answer 1

The core.ignorecase config option was not set and Visual Studio had renamed the .Designer.cs file in case, switching from a capital to lower "D" (or vice versa). That was the problem in the end. It took me some file history breakup (deleting and re-adding files) to resolve this error after setting the option to true. Actually the option was set on one computer, but when cloning the repository, the setting got lost somehow. And then destiny was only waiting for VS to rename that file to catch me.

So on Windows, you always need to make sure that these two settings are correct after any init/clone operation:

git config core.ignorecase true
git config core.autocrlf false

Some tools (TGit, gitscc etc.) don't seem to do it right. It's absolutely necessary for normal operation on Windows, but Git doesn't care if they're not set correctly and just lets you stumble over them not telling you why. It's as much lying as it's helpful in this matter.