Question

Aim: I want to rebase commit G from “bravo”, onto commit F from “alpha”.
From this:

             G    bravo
            /
        D--E--F   alpha
       /
A--B--C           mainline

To this:

                G    bravo
               /
        D--E--F     alpha
       /
A--B--C             mainline

“alpha” has been successfully rebased onto the latest mainline work. I cherry-pick “alpha” onto C. And when I cherry-pick “bravo”, it comes up with all the merge conflicts. Once I fix those, if I do

commit --amend

The commit message just has all the information for alpha, whereas I’d expect the information for bravo. So I tried again after hard resetting to C, doing pull (as oppose to cherry-pick) for alpha and then pull bravo. Fixed the conflicts and just ran:

commit

The commit message just lists it as a merge and has merge information. Though the commit succeeds, I can’t push this to gerrit as it says I don’t have the rights to push merges. When I’ve read about rebase, it’s always just to mainline, but I want to rebase private branches. Where am I going wrong?

Answer 1

After researching rebasing etc, I have found in this scenario where you wish to cherry-pick bravo onto another cherry-picked change (alpha) then when you commit only use

commit

not

commit --amend

This will retain bravo’s commit message and happily “rebase” it onto alpha’s latest patch-set.