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gitrebase
M Jacobs
M Jacobs

Reputation: 260

Git rebase tries to apply changes to wrong file

I have a problem understanding what goes wrong in the following scenario:

I have a feature branch X that is behind on development, so I do a rebase of this feature branch by calling git rebase development when the HEAD is on this feature branch X. Git now replays all commits of my feature branch on development, and it stops on a commit that has conflicts. I fixed the conflict by removing some files that shouldn't be there in the first place and added the folder to my .gitignore then I continue by staging the changes and git rebase --continue. Now the rebase stops again on a commit that has changes to some of the files that I removed earlier. However, instead of noting that this specific file does not exist anymore, git tries to apply the changes to a different file in the folder!

Why is this default behavior? (I run Git 2.0)

The diff of the conflicting file is like this:

++<<<<<<< HEAD:<path>/XML/fileA.xslt
+ [...]  
+  
++=======
+ [....]
+       
++>>>>>>> <commit message>:<path>/XML/fileB.html

Upvotes: 4

Views: 562

Answers (2)

Emil Davtyan
Emil Davtyan

Reputation: 14089

Why is this default behavior?

Each commit stores a tree of the files, when you rebase ( as I understand ) it simply merges each commit commit in starting from the base commit.

What happens when you resolve the conflict by say removing the file fileA.xslt in the directory /XML/ which is itself is stored as a tree is something like this :

git ls-tree HEAD XML/
... blob ... fileA.xslt
... blob ... fileB.html

After removal the XML directory tree looks something like this :

git ls-tree HEAD XML/
... blob ... fileB.html

Now if you try to merge it again with a tree with the removed file present ( the commit where it is modified ) :

git ls-tree HEAD XML/
... blob ... fileA.xslt
... blob ... fileB.html

So my guess is to match it will probably try to convert the fileB.html into fileA.xst as they are both the first file in the different versions of the XML tree or have been determined to be very similar.

BTW : You can do an interactive rebase and edit, skip, or reorder the commits if it is necessary.

Upvotes: 1

Andrei Dziahel
Andrei Dziahel

Reputation: 969

Because git doesn't record changes made, just snapshots, your changes were erroneously detected as renaming .xml to .html and replacing its' content with content of .html file. I think there might be some switch that provides hints for git on that matter, but I'm not sure.

Upvotes: 0

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