Question

if another developer branches out on branch DEVELOPER_A, and makes a lot of commits on that branch, when he’s done, I want to merge his work onto master. but I don’t want all his small commits to show up on the master branch history, and only care about the last commit.
so is there a way to “squash ” his history on branch DEVELOPER_A when merging that branch?

I could get a patch on developer_A branch, and apply to master, but I’m afraid git will lose track of the fact that the result is merged from developer_A branch, and merely thinks that this is some independent change

Thanks
Yang

Answer 1

You can do this in several ways, but the most obvious is to use a squashed merge.

git merge --squash <other_branch>
git commit

Note that git will pre-populate your merge commit message with the log messages from the squashed commits, but you are free to edit or delete the messages to suit yourself.