"git pull --rebase" leads to "Cannot rebase onto multiple branches"

Question

So, my work environment has precisely one branch with a remote companion on Github. I'm trying to do git pull --rebase in order to prevent git push from creating merge commit messages that don't provide new information to others working on this project and just gum up the works. But when I try that, it gives me this:

From https://github.com/our_profile/our_repository
 * branch            HEAD        -> FETCH_HEAD
Cannot rebase onto multiple branches

And the pull aborts. Calling git branch informs me that I have only one branch on my local machine, so what's going on?

Solution 1

Try specifying exactly what remote branch you want to pull:

git pull --rebase origin branch

Alternatively you can also git fetch all changes from the remote repository first, and then rebase manually:

git rebase origin/branch

Solution 2

In my case, I had to be both specific about which remote and move the --rebase flag to the end of the command.

So: git pull origin master --rebase

Learned from this answer: Git: Cannot rebase onto multiple branches

Comments

[Admin]

This nearly worked, but it ended up causing problems involving lots of files being marked for deletion. I had to go in to git GUI to save the work I had done on them.

[Hazok]

I thought git pull did a fetch by default which is evident by all the fetch messaging that comes in. What does the above add?

[dbn]

Do you know why this situation occurred?

[caot]

Is there a way to find what branches have the issue?