Question

Background:

I have a feature branch A that is one commit ahead of my development branch:

3   (develop, origin/develop)
| 2 (A, origin/A) some feature branch commit
|/
1   some commit

Then I rebase A on develop (git checkout A, git rebase develop), so I get:

2'  (A) some feature branch commit
|
3   (develop, origin/develop)
| 2 (origin/A) some feature branch commit
|/
1   some commit

Now I can no longer push A to origin as Git will reject a non-fast forward commit. It tells me to first pull the remote changes.

When I do so and then push, I end up with the following history:

4   (A, origin/A) merged origin/A into A
|\
2'| some feature branch commit
| |
3 | (develop, origin/develop)
| 2 (origin/A) some feature branch commit
|/
1   some commit

I end up with a history containing the 2 commit twice — technically different commits although they do the same thing.

Questions

1. How can I prevent this from happening? How can I mirror my local rebase operation on the remote repo?
2. How can I remedy this situation? What would be the most elegant way to clean up the history and show only one commit?

Answer 1

1. A rebase is rewriting history – to avoid trouble don’t rebase things that are pushed.

2. You can push --force while A is checked out. origin/A history will be overwritten with your version of A. Note that this will require manual intervention from other developers in their repos afterwards.