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Suppose I have 2 branches master and dev.

The dev branch is ahead of master by 2 commits, and neither of those commits is merged or pushed to any remote.

The dev branch looks like this:

dev A - B - C - D - E

Whereas, A is oldest, and E newest commit.

Id like to get to this state:

dev A - B - C - E

Basically I want to nuke the commit before the last commit, as if it never happened. There should be no conflicts either (E does not depend on D's changes).

Could I use interactive rebase?

if __name__ is None
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1 Answers1

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I would use the itneractive form of rebase. While on dev (you need to have clean working copy):

git rebase -i HEAD~~

In your favourite text editor, you get a list of last 2 commits. Just comment/delete the line for the unwanted commit.

If HEAD depends on changes introduced by HEAD~, you could get merge conflicts and after you resolve them, you will loose your previous history (still available through the reflog, of course). I usually prefer this method.

If you want to conserve your previous history (and the unneeded commit), you should do 

git checkout HEAD~~         # go to last good commit
git checkout -b new_branch  # create a new branch and forget about the original
git cherry_pick dev         # copy the commit on top of `dev` to `new_branch`

You will still get a conflict, but you won't be modifying the history of dev.

On the other hand, if the unwanted commit was on master and you didn't want to break anybody's build, you would do git revert HEAD~

Vorac
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  • Ahh, in the end I couldn't avoid merge conflict anyway. Resolved both. Thanks. – if __name__ is None Mar 05 '15 at 16:26
  • @JanNetherdrake, you can either modify `E` to resolve the conflict, or go to a new branch. Expanded on that in the answer. Btw I love `rebase -i` - you can reorder, split, squash, rename etc. commits. – Vorac Mar 05 '15 at 16:45