<p>I ran into a strange issue while attempting to checkout a remote tracking branch of an Intridea project earlier today, so I thought I'd post up my work around.</p> <p>I ran my normal checkout command, like so...</p> <pre class="terminal">brent:~/Intridea/earthaid[master]$ git checkout -b prod origin/prod<br /></pre> <p>which resulted in this error message</p> <pre class="terminal">fatal: git checkout: updating paths is incompatible with switching branches.<br />Did you intend to checkout 'origin/prod' which can not be resolved as commit</pre> <p>After a bit of googling, I'm still not sure of the cause as most of the search results were related to issues around deploying tags, and I was merely attempting a checkout.&nbsp; What I did find out was that I could specify the start point of my new branch by the revision/commit sha instead of the remote branch name, like so...</p> <pre class="terminal">brent:~/Intridea/earthaid[master]$ git branch prod 02314583a99abdc276cde968c20babbadd23<br />brent:~/Intridea/earthaid[master]$ gc prod<br />Switched to branch "prod"<br />brent:~/Intridea/earthaid[prod]$<br /></pre> <p>Once I had applied my changes, I just had to make sure to push them to the proper branch.</p> <p>[update]</p> <p><img src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/brentmc79-prod/files/6/original.jpg?1241620873" alt="farside_cartoon.jpg" width="320" height="231" /></p> <p>Ok, I'm a retard.&nbsp; About a minute or two after I typed up this post, it occurred to me that Git couldn't resolve the remote branch name because I hadn't pulled first.&nbsp; Yeah, that's right.&nbsp; All I need to do was pull and then everything worked properly.</p> 2009-05-06T14:44:45Z Attempting to create a Git branch resulted in "updating paths is incompatible" error message. The solution, pull first. Doh! 29 git, fatal error, pull, updating paths true git-checkout-woes-updated 2009-05-06T14:49:42Z