I'm trying to add a .gitignore to a large repository.
I pulled the branches into a new local repository containing only the visualstudio.gitignore file ('master'), checked out the oldest branch (that all other branches depend on = 'rootBranch') and tried to run git rebase using git rebase master
(while being on rootBranch)
I thought this would add the .gitignore as the "base" and then stack every other commit in rootBranch on top of it. But now I'm getting multiple conflicts, in multiple commits and sub-branches, VisualStudio telling me "both modified" even though the only change is an added .gitignore (which shouldn't affect the files that have conflicts).
How is this even possible? I make no changes to the code that aren't already known, how could I have conflicts there? The repository used to be a TFVC TeamProject, maybe the automatic conversion using git-tfs made some kind of illegal change that becomes apparent only now during the rebase?