Stupid git!

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Emacs.

git has struck again, and another couple of hours valuable time have
been lost.

Having "staged" a change with `git add', I then tried to commit it with
`git commit'.  Somebody else had got in before me, so I had to pull
their changes first - fair enough.

So I did `git pull'.  I was then dumped into an editing session for a
merge operation for .../test/automated/file-notify-tests.el.  Eh?  I've
never touched this file in my life, and didn't even know it existed.  So
why is a merge necessary/why has a merge been (half-)done?  Why didn't
git pull simply merge the changes to this file into my repository and
working directory?

So I aborted this merge operation, in order to see what it's doing
first.  git has kindly discarded my (staged) change, leaving no record
of its existence - good job I've still got a copy of the changed file in
Emacs.  Scrabbling around in the .git directory, I found the commit
message in a file there.  So all is not lost.

How do I see what changes are in file-notify-tests.el, which is in the
staging area?  I would have thought some variety of `git diff' ought to
do the trick, but how to do this is not made obvious in the fine manual
for `git diff'.

Time to save my changed file and have a coffee.  Isn't git wonderful!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).