I wanted to have a simple solution to squash two merge commits together during an interactive rebase.
My repository looks like:
X --- Y --------- M1 -------- M2 (my-feature)
/ / /
/ / /
a --- b --- c --- d --- e --- f (stable)
That is, I have a my-feature
branch that has been merged twice recently, with no real commits in between. I don't just want to rebase the my-feature
branch since it is a published branch of its own, I just want to squash together the last two merge commits into one (haven't published those commits yet)
X --- Y ---- M (my-feature)
/ /
/ /
a --- ... -- f (stable)
I tried:
git rebase -p -i M1^
But I got:
Refusing to squash a merge: M2
What I finally did is:
git checkout my-feature
git reset --soft HEAD^ # remove the last commit (M2) but keep the changes in the index
git commit -m toto # redo the commit M2, this time it is not a merge commit
git rebase -p -i M1^ # do the rebase and squash the last commit
git diff M2 HEAD # test the commits are the same
Now, the new merge commit is not considered a merge commit anymore (it only kept the first parent). So:
git reset --soft HEAD^ # get ready to modify the commit
git stash # put away the index
git merge -s ours --no-commit stable # regenerate merge information (the second parent)
git stash apply # get the index back with the real merge in it
git commit -a # commit your merge
git diff M2 HEAD # test that you have the same commit again
But this can get complicated if I have many commits, do you have a better solution ? Thanks.
Mildred
This is an old topic, but I just ran across it while looking for similar information.
A trick similar to the one described in Subtree octopus merge is a really good solution to this type of problem:
git checkout my-feature
git reset --soft Y
git rev-parse f > .git/MERGE_HEAD
git commit
That will take the index as it exists at the tip of my-feature, and use it to create a new commit off of Y, with 'f' as a second parent. The result is the same as if you'd never performed M1, but gone straight to performing M2.