How to resolve "unmerged: ..." git status?

Question

I have the following git status and I need to get rid of pluginA and pluginB:

# Changed but not updated:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#   unmerged:   vendor/plugins/pluginA
#   unmerged:   vendor/plugins/pluginB

I have a repository with these branches that are shared between the client and myself:

master (client version of the code)
production (our production version of the code)
development (our development version of the code)

Changes have been made in master that we need to start using and I need to leave production and development alone. I've created a new "merge" branch (based on development) and merged the code from master. Unfortunately it has left us with the two plugin issues above. These were removed in the master but are still in the development branch. When merging I had messages like:

CONFLICT (directory/file): There is a directory with name vendor/plugins/pluginA in HEAD. Adding vendor/plugins/pluginA as vendor/plugins/pluginA~master

Since I am trying to get the master version, how can I just remove the plugins? Seems like most other deleted files were merged correctly.

Solution

You got a conflict because git found a directory (vendor/plugins/pluginA directory in development) when a file was found in merge's remote (vendor/plugins/pluginA file in master).

Since it isn't possible to merge a file with a directory, git makes a copy of the master data in vendor/plugins/pluginA~master (to avoid losing data), and leaves you with a conflict that needs to be resolved manually.

Move/rename/delete/copy/edit/whatever those files to get your code to the desired state, then git add the changes and git commit the conflict resolution.