From: Vikrant Varma Date: Wed, 01 May 2013 11:22:05 GMT Subject: [PATCH 0/2] Better advice on merge Message-ID: <1367407327-5216-1-git-send-email-vikrant.varma94@gmail.com> If origin/foo exists, but foo doesn't: $ git merge foo fatal: foo - not something we can merge This patch series improves the error message. If a remote branch exists with the same name, it now says: $ git merge foo fatal: foo - not something we can merge Did you mean this? origin/foo It does this by adding a new help function, help_unknown_ref, that takes care of printing the more friendly error message, and modifies builtin/merge.c to use it. In the future, this could also be extended to other operations involving branches that don't exist locally, instead of providing blanket failure error messages (eg. git checkout foo). Vikrant Varma (2): help: add help_unknown_ref merge: use help_unknown_ref instead of die builtin/merge.c | 4 ++-- help.c | 44 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ help.h | 6 ++++++ 3 files changed, 52 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) -- 1.8.3-rc0