title: Git working with remote merges
body: <p>I've been reading Pro Git, and I think I get how things should be done. But I might have made some weird adjustments in my ignorence before, maybe egit made incomplete changes to the repo one of the times it cause eclipse to crash or I'm just missing something. I've now given up on egit &amp; am using git from the cmd line.</p>
  
  <p>Am trying to merge from a remote and I get the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[root@localhost justifventures-opentaps]# git remote -v
  origin  http://git.gitorious.org/opentaps/opentaps.git (fetch)
  origin  http://git.gitorious.org/opentaps/opentaps.git (push)
  [root@localhost justifventures-opentaps]# git remote show
  origin
  [root@localhost justifventures-opentaps]# git remote show origin
  * remote origin
    Fetch URL: http://git.gitorious.org/opentaps/opentaps.git
    Push  URL: http://git.gitorious.org/opentaps/opentaps.git
    HEAD branch: master
    Remote branches:
      1.5M1       new (next fetch will store in remotes/origin)
      dataimport  new (next fetch will store in remotes/origin)
      master      new (next fetch will store in remotes/origin)
      upgrade-1.5 new (next fetch will store in remotes/origin)
    Local ref configured for 'git push':
      master pushes to master (local out of date)
  [root@localhost justifventures-opentaps]# git merge origin/master
  fatal: 'origin/master' does not point to a commit
  [root@localhost justifventures-opentaps]# 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>One of the things that worries me is that this remote is suppossed to be read only, so am not sure why there is the line:</p>
  
  <pre><code>origin  http://git.gitorious.org/opentaps/opentaps.git (push)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Also it says :</p>
  
  <pre><code>Local ref configured for 'git push': master pushes to master (local out of date)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the problem. I've tried removing the remotes and adding them again but this config seems to be the same.</p>
  
  <p>Hopefully someone with more experience can shed some light on my confusion. </p>