CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitversion-control
Mr. Shickadance
Mr. Shickadance

Reputation: 5473

How to remove duplicate history from a git repo?

I tried using a git filter-branch command I've seen in a related post to rename a batch of old commits. The result is that now my repo has a number of identical commits with different authors. It left me with the following scenario:

A' -> B' -> C'
               \
A  -> B  -> C -> D -> E -> F

A' is identical to A except for the commit author, and the same for B' and C'. I'd like to remove all references and history of A', B', and C'. Note: none of these commits are on a branch or have a tag.

How do I remove the duplicate commit history? This is the result I'm after:

A  -> B  -> C -> D -> E -> F

My reason for this is to simply clean up the history. I am the only one who touches this code, and I know this wouldn't be a good thing to attempt on any kind of non-trivial repo. Also, it seems as though there are many similar questions, but I can't seem to piece together a working solution.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 382

Answers (1)

Mr. Shickadance
Mr. Shickadance

Reputation: 5473

EDIT: Well, this almost worked. The only problem I see from this is that it overwrote the submission times for the most recent commits (D+).

It seems I've found a solution. I was dancing around it all day, but finally figured out the correct commits to reference. Going by my example above, I cloned a new repo with the latest master branch. From there I found the C commits' hash, which represents the last know good state. Then I run rebase in interactive mode:

git rebase -i <the C commits' hash>

In the editor that appears, only the duplicate commits that I wanted to delete appeared (up until current history). So I removed all the old duplicate entries up to the D commit. After saving the rebase command completed without error.

At this point my local repository seemed to have everything in order, so I forced it onto the server:

git push --force origin master

The end result seems to be exactly what I was looking for:

A  -> B  -> C -> D -> E -> F

Not sure if it is the best way, but then again this isn't really something you want to be doing.

Upvotes: 1

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