Unfathomable merge conflict

Hi,

I want to do a kind of manual rebase where I check out an older version of a branch and simply re-apply a selection of the commits following this point in history.

So in this specific case, I want to check out v2.6.25 of linux-2.6.git and re-apply all the changes that were made to the file net/mac80211/rc80211_pid_algo.c between v2.6.25 and v2.6.26-rc4.

In order to determine which commits I need, I used the following command:

$ git log --follow v2.6.25..v2.6.26-rc4 net/mac80211/rc80211_pid_algo.c

The last entry on the screen is this:

commit 8318d78a44d49ac1edf2bdec7299de3617c4232e
Author: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
Date:   Thu Jan 24 19:38:38 2008 +0100

    cfg80211 API for channels/bitrates, mac80211 and driver conversion

so I checkout v2.6.25 and try to cherry-pick it. But it fails with a conflict:

CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in net/mac80211/rc80211_pid_algo.c

So I wonder: How can this happen? This should be the first change since v2.6.25 that touches the file, yet it fails with a conflict in the very same file. Where does the conflict come from?

I have tried both --date-order and --topo-order for git-log, and also used the symmetric difference (...) in addition to the range format (..), but still this is displayed the first commit (in chronological order) that should be applied.

Thanks in advance for any explanations or tips.

Vegard