Git merge after a merge

Question

Consider a scenario where while merging a branch lets say feature into master (git megre origin/feature) and after resolving conflicts, if someone pushes into the master branch again during this process. Now, we cannot push the merge into master as they have diverted again. I see these options in these scenarios.

• git rebase origin/master - This will screw up the whole merge history.
• git merge origin/master - But now we have two merge commits in the history and the second one is in most cases unnecessary.
• Discard all your work, fast forward you local branch to latest master and merge again with feature branch.

Is there anything obvious I am missing which is cleaner and does not requires to redo the merge conflict work we just did?

Answer 1

I think that you may want to try the following command:

git pull --rebase=preserve

or following if the upstream is already fetched

git rebase -p origin/master

where the semantics of option --rebase (according to the doc) is as follows:

When set to preserve, rebase with the --preserve-merges option passed to git rebase so that locally created merge commits will not be flattened.

However note that according to the doc of git rebase,

Merge conflict resolutions or manual amendments to merge commits are not preserved.

In order to avoid resolving conflicts again you can look into the usage of git rerere.