problem with cherry picking

Someone at work here jumped the gun and committed something before fetching an amended branch. Typical stuff -- now his work and the repo's work diverged. His change was purely new files, no big deal. In gitk, reset his dev to origin/remote/dev, then cherry-pick his new commit.

But it barfed all over the place. One problem was read-only files. But even after purging those, it had the same complaint, something about untracked file would be modified. What's the deal here?

I talked him through accomplishing it another way -- reset hard back to his new commit, reset mixed to the proper ancestor, and re-doing the commit.

But I want to understand what the issue is here.

--John

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