Re: Possibly-spurious 'not uptodate. Cannot merge'

On 14 Dec 2008, Junio C. Hamano said:

Ancient git, whose "git merge" was a scripted command, refreshed the index
before starting, but it lost that when the command was rewritten in C soon
after v1.5.6 by 1c7b76b (Build in merge, 2008-07-07), and nobody noticed
it until 76c3fb1 (Merge branch 'mv/merge-refresh', 2008-10-09).  In other
words, the tip of 'master' (and upcoming 1.6.1) already has the fix.

Excellent! I do love this precognitive bugfixing thing.

(It's not as if the update-index workaround is terribly onerous, but
it's annoying and not something a git newbie might think of.)