How I got out of the mess:
As I kept pulling to test my solutions I had to make use of...
git reset --hard
which moves you back to the most recent commit in the log.
git clean -fd
which kills off the untracked files since the more recent commit in the log.
Eventually I decided I needed to change the offending settings file to chmod 777
and commit the permission change. Another option would have been to change Git into permission agnostic mode with git config core.filemode false
Read more here: How do I make Git ignore file mode (chmod) changes?
Then I did a pull to merge the changes and have the log update along with the files, changed the permission of the offending file back to 644 and commit that... and pushed it back to the working master (glad that's allowed.)
Seems like this is a bug that having a permission failure allows the file changesets to be merged but the log history doesn't reflect the commits!!!
BTW: My git --version
is git version 1.5.6.5