Question

In git, i have 2 commit and a branch merge that have been rebased to look like this

7
6_
  5
  4
3_|
2
1

the merge was done with no-ff.

my client doens’t want to roll out commits 1 and 2, so im trying to rebase it to look like this

1
2
7
6_
  5
  4
3_|

This is desirable because then i can branch off of commit 7 and that is my production release.

rebase -i XXXX

flattens the whole thing and has a huge number of conflicts. since im trying to prepare a production rollout, i don’t want to have conflicts because the code will have to go back to testing.

when i do this

rebase -i -p XXXXXX

it moves the commits 1 and 2 correctly, but it deletes the merge and the 4 weeks of work associated with it. how in the world do i do this?

Answer 1

Create a patch from the two commits and apply them in reverse mode to head.

Pro:

1. Simple solution
2. pretty safe depending on the size of the changes

Con:

1. Leaves the commits in the commit history
2. Depending on the amount of changes to the code that is in the two commits, (i.e. changes to the code that happens in the rev. 3-7), the reverse apply won’t work

Another hack would be to checkout without the last 7 revisions. Then create patches for the revisions 3-7 and apply those. Should give you the same result and a clean commit history.

But in both cases, I’m wary because you got a lot of conflicts during the rebase.