CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitrebase
halogenr
halogenr

Reputation: 339

Remove past (double) merge commits from history

I'd like to perform the following transformation in Git : To remove the 2 merge commits and replace them with individual commits from the 2 green and pink branchs (I want a linear history)

enter image description here

I've checked the similar questions on SO, and I thought that these commands would simply do the job, without any conflict, since Git would be smart enough to use the merge commits when rebasing :

git checkout master
git rebase c
# (I am allowed to force-push btw)
git push --force

But I get an (unexpected for me) conflict during rebase because of commit C .... :(

Is there any way of achieving this linear commit history w/o any conflict to be resolved ? Should I do it in two+ steps ?

NOTE1: There are actually many more commits between E and D, between c and a and between 1 and 2, so I'd like to avoid tedious manual cherry-picks.... :) (I've posted a simplified graph for the question)

NOTE2: It works fine when there is only one merge commits, following the 3rd tip in this SO answer. But here there are 2 merge commits as you can see in the pic.

Thanks in advance for your help ?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 87

Answers (1)

ti7
ti7

Reputation: 18886

If you want all the individual commits, choose to fast-forward merge when you do

Because you've merged already, you should be able to re-merge the commits or cherry-pick 'em over (though this is almost-certainly worse and much less-obvious than leaving things as they are)

In your example, if there are any conflicting changes in the other branches merged after C, you'll need to regenerate it into some C', which contains the merge conflict fix of the branch and C

Additionally, the history is linear, and assuming the unlabeled merge of the pink branch before D is a squash merge on top of C in your example, that merge actually contains both

  • all the commits in the pink branch
  • any merge conflict changes needed (a form of this fix is needed and what git is complaining about when you attempted to rebase)

You can show this by attempting to revert it How to revert a merge commit that's already pushed to remote branch?

What you probably want in the future is to periodically merge your main branch into your development branch

Upvotes: 1

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