Your branch and 'origin/master' have diverged

Hi all,

A colleague of mine (after a relatively long absence) noticed the following when running "git status":

# On branch master # Your branch and 'origin/master' have diverged, # and have 250 and 19 different commit(s) each, respectively. # nothing to commit (working directory clean)

He asked me what to do and I told him to do what has always worked for me in the past when something like this happened: gitk, "reset master branch to here" (to a commit before the divergence and using --hard), git pull origin master. Problem solved.

Well, not this one. This one is persistent. :-) I am at a loss what to do. "master" and "origin/master" do *not* point at the same commit. Even after the "git reset --hard ..." and "git pull". Running my silver bullet solution gets us in the same situation every time.

I checked his .git/config and it looks fine.

Any ideas? What information should I provide that might make it possible for you to help me?

Cheers, Hilco