I committed some test code before merging in a remote branch. This merge had a lot of conflicts and took some serious time to put right. So my history looks something like this:
7ab562c Merge from remote branch
... whole load of commits brought across from the remote branch...
f3e71c2 Temporary TESTING COMMIT
The test code is fine, I really just want to change the commit message. Normally I'd go right ahead with a git rebase -i f3e71c2^
(since none of this has been pushed yet), but I've been told by a colleague that this will mess up the merge. I really don't want to mess up the merge :)
Is my colleague correct? And if so, is there anything I can do, or do I just need to live with this history?
You can try a git rebase --preserve-merges --interactive
, with:
-p
--preserve-merges
Instead of ignoring merges, try to recreate them.
The BUG section of the man page includes:
The todo list presented by
--preserve-merges --interactive
does not represent the topology of the revision graph.
Editing commits and rewording their commit messages should work fine, but attempts to reorder commits tend to produce counterintuitive results.
As jthill's comment describes (since -p
will better preserve merges if conflict resolutions were recorder):
You can retroactively light rerere for a merge:
git config rerere.enabled true
git checkout $merge^1
git merge $merge^2
# for Windows:
# git merge $merge^^2
git read-tree --reset -u $merge
git commit -m-
git checkout @{-1}
As noted by Soufiane Roui in the comments:
For Windows CMD users, use double caret to point for parents of the merge commit (e.g
$merge^^1
instead of$merge^1
).
Because the caret is considered as an escape character.