Question

I have a repository in Git. I made a branch, then did some changes both to the master and to the branch.

Then, tens of commits later, I realized the branch is in much better state than the master, so I want the branch to “become” the master and disregard the changes on master.

I cannot merge it, because I don’t want to keep the changes on master. What should I do?

Extra: In this case, the ‘old’ master has already been push-ed to another repository such as GitHub. How does this change things?

Answer 1

The problem with the other two answers is that the new master doesn’t have the old master as an ancestor, so when you push it, everyone else will get messed up. This is what you want to do:

git checkout better_branch
git merge --strategy=ours master    # keep the content of this branch, but record a merge
git checkout master
git merge better_branch             # fast-forward master up to the merge

If you want your history to be a little clearer, I’d recommend adding some information to the merge commit message to make it clear what you’ve done. Change the second line to:

git merge --strategy=ours --no-commit master
git commit          # add information to the template merge message