Question

I want to do something similar to what the standard interactive rebase does, but I want to use it just to clean up my branch’s history and not pull in any updates from another branch. So, I want to keep the ‘branching point’ the same. For example, if my branch is B1:

--O--O--O--O--O--O------O--O----O--O   master
      \
       O---O--x--x--x--O--O--x--x--O   B1

In the above diagram, O is a clean commit and x is a messy commit I want to squash with the ones before it and maybe change the commit message. With a normal interactive rebase on master I could get this:

--O--O--O--O--O--O------O--O----O--O                        master
                                    \
                                     O---O--X--O--O--X--O   B1

Where X is messy commits squashed together with a cleaned up commit message. But how can I get the below?

--O--O--O--O--O--O------O--O----O--O   master
      \
       O---O--X--O--O--X--O            B1

Answer 1

You can rebase on any commit, not just on master‘s HEAD. Let’s say your branch point of B1 is 12345, then you can interactively rebase B1 on that commit with

# make sure you are on B1
$ git checkout B1

$ git rebase -i 12345

Then cleanup the history.

See git help rebase for more pointers.