Re: Confused by git am error message.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 18, 2012, 22:51 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr4pzj66e.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <747F66C694C844EAA56F4BB62C405F78@PhilipOakley>

"Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> [a user confusion report]
> I was updating my patch series manually aand made a mistake, so the
> series didn't apply properly. However the error message confused me.
>
>    ...
>    Applying: Doc clean: add See Also links
>    fatal: corrupt patch at line 17
>    Patch failed at 0008 Doc clean: add See Also links
>    When you have resolved this problem run "git am --resolved".
>    ...
>
> In my case I resolved the _patch_ error, and then expected that doing
> the 'git am --resolved' would try to re-apply the patch and continue
> happily - I had checked that the status was clean - but it didn't.

I recall we went back and forth before settling to the current wording. The "have resolved this problem" in that sentence wants to say "The underlying 'apply --index' did not manage to update the working tree and the index to the state a perfect patch would have updated, so please help me by doing so yourself".

When it did not apply (i.e. not "conflicted when run as 'am -3'"), an alternative is to edit $GIT_DIR/rebase-apply/patch to make it applicable, and say "git am" again _without_ "--resolved". But that is not what the message is suggesting.