error: addinfo_cache failed during merge

Hi all-

I'm in the process of implementing whitespace and EOL normalization for our repo.  Having completed the work on our oldest maintenance branch, I'm attempting to merge the changes recursively into newer branches.

My approach is to merge using '-s recursive -X ours --no-commit' since the only conflicts are whitespace/EOL changes and I have to renormalize the current branch before committing anyway (new files, etc.).  Unfortunately, during the merge, I got a bunch of errors like this:

error: addinfo_cache failed for path 'foo/bar.h'

So first, is this important?  Second, can that message be replaced with something more helpful?  I'm not exactly a newbie, and I certainly can't grok that message...

Doing a bit of archeology, pickaxe shows it arose in 0424138 "Fix bogus error message from merge-recursive error path", but that was Junio cleaning up the message a bit.  The original message is from the creation of merge-recursive.c in 6d297f8 "Status update on merge-recursive in C".  I should caveat that my local git/git is a little out of date because I haven't repointed it since k.org went down (I use it very rarely), so there might be something newer in this area.

Thanks, Stephen