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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T09:30:15+00:00

I imported a Bazaar repository into Git (using git bzr ), but the resulting

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I imported a Bazaar repository into Git (using git bzr), but the resulting repository contains a spurious commit parent link:

Spurious parent link

Notice that the commit tagged 1.02-6 is based off the 1.02-3 commit, but 1.02-1 is unnecessarily also marked as a parent. (Note: All the commits in this part of the repo are tagged; there are no commits between the ones shown.)

I have tried rebasing in several ways (on the master branch: git rebase 1.02-3, git rebase -i upstream-1.02, git rebase --onto 1.02-1 1.02-3, git rebase --root upstream-1.02 --onto=other_branch), but in each case it fails with a merge conflict. These seem to be attempting more than is necessary; the history is correct except for an extra parent pointer being recorded in the commit tagged 1.02-6.

How do you remove the link in order to linearize the history? Is there a better way than manually cherry-picking all the commits in sequence?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can do it manually using the git commit-tree internal command.

    We want to edit the commit tagged 1.02-6 to remove the spurious parent pointer (to 56a2f3b5948ab54c9239c2b384a6ea9eb1f410c4).

    First, read the information from the existing commit object:

    user@host:/path/repo.git$ git cat-file -p 1.02-6 
tree c658aa1ebcf2bf2a607696c7868b875be72fb01f
parent 56a2f3b5948ab54c9239c2b384a6ea9eb1f410c4
parent 4e671bf1d2298729c9e5cfd8229051cfe2c40831
author James Damour (Suvarov454) <suvarov454@users.sourceforge.net> 1146319620 -0400
committer Bazaar Package Importer <james.westby@ubuntu.com> 1146319620 -0400

The "main/" in the Section line of debian/control should be assumed.

    Extract the commit message using git log --format=%B -n 1 1.02-6.

    Now create a new commit with the same content (excluding the spurious parent link, and the committer info):

    git log --format=%B -n 1 1.02-6 | \
    GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="James Damour (Suvarov454)" \
    GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="suvarov454@users.sourceforge.net" \
    GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="1146319620 -0400" \
    git commit-tree c658aa1ebcf2bf2a607696c7868b875be72fb01f \
        -p 4e671bf1d2298729c9e5cfd8229051cfe2c40831

    This created a new commit, and printed its hash (cc32e66…). Now turn it into a new branch:

    git checkout -b fixed_commit cc32e66

    and rebase master onto the new branch:

    git checkout master
git rebase fixed_commit

    And we’re done:

    Finished

    You probably want to delete the old branches and re-tag the appropriate commits.

    Actually it might be easier to use git filter-branch --parent-filter. I haven’t tried that.

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