CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitmerge
cuckoo
cuckoo

Reputation: 229

Reverting a git merge while allowing for the same merge later)

What's the best way to revert a committed git merge while keeping the option of merging the same branch at a later point?

This is for a situation when I merge a branch into HEAD, then decide that I do not want these changes at the present, but still want the option to merge them into HEAD at some later point.

"git revert -m 1" reverts the code to the pre-merge state, but the branch is still somehow marked as "already merged". So a repeated merge with the same branch at a later point does not work.

This should be a very common problem (and git is an evolved tool), yet I cannot find a simple clean solution (apart from destroying the git repository and pulling it from remote again). Am I missing something?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1424

Answers (3)

David Sugar
David Sugar

Reputation: 1256

If you have not yet published your merge commit (pushed to the central server), the best solution is to rewrite history to remove the merge commit.

  1. If there are no other commits after the merge commit, reset the head to the previous commit:

git reset HEAD^

  1. If there are other commits after the merge commit, you'll need to do a rebase and remove the merge commit, while re-applying the other commits.

git rebase -i

If you have published the merge, you will need to decide whether it is better to rewrite history to preserve proper merge potential for your branch, or simply add a revert commit. This will require talking to everyone who may have potentially downloaded the merge.

If you cannot rewrite history, you'll need to do a revert:

git revert -m 1

In this case, a future merge of the branch will need manual intervention. You may need to cherry-pick commits that are not picked up by the merge, or revert your revert commit.

Upvotes: 1

j6t
j6t

Reputation: 13617

Sorry to say that you have wasted your branch.

But there is a workaround. The trick is to "rewrite" the merge commit temporarily so that it forgets that the branch is a parent. Assume X is the merge commit:

git replace --graft X X^   # pretend that there is just one parent
git merge branch           # merge the branch again
git replace --delete X     # remove the replacement

Upvotes: 9

Oleksandr Vyshniakov
Oleksandr Vyshniakov

Reputation: 251

If your merge commit is not pushed yet and it is the top one, you can use reset command

git reset --hard HEAD^

Note, that all uncommitted changes will be lost.

Upvotes: 1

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