Conflicts are not shown during Git rebase

Question

I am facing a weird issue while trying to rebase a branch with master branch. Scenario is as given below:

• I had to create a new branch using the a commit which is 21 commits behind master.
• Checked out to the particular commit git checkout git checkout <sha>
• Created new local branch git switch -c feature_branch
• Pushed the local branch to remote git push origin feature_branch
• I do have some changes in the newly created branch feature_branch compared to master.
• Now I want to rebase my feature_branch with the master git rebase master.
  

  First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
  Fast-forwarded feature_branch to master.```
  

• The changes in the feature_branch has been over-written by master and no conflicts were shown during the rebase.

Could anybody please explain what is going on here. It would be really helpful, as I maybe missing some basics here.

Thank you

Answer 1

git rebase <target> [<source>] will take all commits from source (defaults to your current branch) and copy them one-by-one to the target. If source is fully contained in target (i.e. all commits of source are also in target), then there are no commits to copy. Rebase is effectively a no-op, with the exception of moving the branch label of source to the same commit as target.

Think of it as commits, as shown by git log --oneline --graph source...target (3 dots), not as changes as shown by git diff source target. You can preview the commits that would be rebased by running git log --oneline target..source—if the output is empty, there are no commits to rebase (source is fully contained in target).

---

If you want to duplicate the commit on master, you have (at least) three options, depending on the exact content of the commits:

1. cherry pick:

   git checkout master
   git cherry-pick bug_fix_commit
   

2. reverting the revert:

   git checkout master
   git revert revert_of_bug_fix_commit
   

3. Instruct rebase to not compute the range of commits automatically, but manually supply the range to copy:

   git rebase --onto master feature_branch^ feature_branch