Question

I have two branches, master and feature.

I finished working on feature, so this branch have a lot of commits, but I don’t want to publish it as is. I want to create a branch called feature_clean with all the modifications from feature but with better commits.

I tried the following:

git checkout -b feature_clean master
git checkout feature
git rebase --interactive feature_clean
# reorganize commits etc, save and close editor

, and this created feature_clean correctly BUT it also modified feature. In fact, both branches were equal.

What did I do wrong? I want to keep feature as is for now (I’ll delete it later, after feature_clean is appropriately tested and approved).

Answer 1

you have your rebase command wrong 😉 you are telling git to rebase the current branch (HEAD, in that case feature) on top of feature_clean. I think what you actually want to do is:

git checkout -b feature_clean feature
git rebase -i master

i.e. replay commits from feature_clean on master. feature will still point to the old commits.

git rebase master is shorthand for git rebase --onto master master HEAD: take all commits between master and HEAD (reachable from HEAD, but not from master) and stick them onto master