Question

Here’s the situation, I have three branches, master, fix#1 and fix#2, where both the latter two are each fixing one specific bug.

The problem is, I based fix#2 on fix#1, instead on branching from master, so it looks something like this

fix#2
|
fix#1
|
master

instead of

fix#1  fix#2
|     / 
master 

Is there any simple way how I can either remove all the fix#1 commits from the fix#2 branch (it’s actually one commit)?

Answer 1

git rebase --onto master fix1 fix2

But make sure you understand what’s to happen and all consequences before you do it.

git rebase -h output:

Usage: git rebase [--interactive | -i] [-v] [--force-rebase | -f] [--no-ff] [--onto <newbase>] (<upstream>|--root) [<branch>] [--quiet | -q]

git-rebase replaces <branch> with a new branch of the
same name.  When the --onto option is provided the new branch starts
out with a HEAD equal to <newbase>, otherwise it is equal to <upstream>
It then attempts to create a new commit for each commit from the original
<branch> that does not exist in the <upstream> branch.

It is possible that a merge failure will prevent this process from being
completely automatic.  You will have to resolve any such merge failure
and run git rebase --continue.  Another option is to bypass the commit
that caused the merge failure with git rebase --skip.  To restore the
original <branch> and remove the .git/rebase-apply working files, use the
command git rebase --abort instead.

Note that if <branch> is not specified on the command line, the
currently checked out branch is used.

Example:       git-rebase master~1 topic

        A---B---C topic                   A'--B'--C' topic
       /                   -->           /
  D---E---F---G master          D---E---F---G master