Git: how to revert a revert

Question

This is my current situation.

I have erroneously merged a pull request that contained rubbish.

So I reverted it using git revert -m 1 <sha of commit>

Now I wish to undo that revert but this time cherry pick only the correct changes.

Please how do I do that?

Thanks

So you don't want to revert the revert, you just want to cherry-pick a few commits into your branch? — Roman, Mar 24 '15 at 15:02
possible duplicate of [How do I "un-revert" a reverted Git commit?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8728093/how-do-i-un-revert-a-reverted-git-commit) — jub0bs, Mar 24 '15 at 15:12

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 25 '15 at 14:30

3

Revert in git is a commit too. So you can simply revert a revert as usual commit:

git revert <revert_you_want_to_undo_sha1>

answered Mar 25 '15 at 14:30

Vitalliuss

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 24 '15 at 15:25

2

You can use git reset to remove the bad commits (including the revert).

Assuming your history looks like:

good -> good -> good -> rubbish -> revertRubbish

You can simply do git reset HEAD~2 to make your version history look like:

good -> good -> good

If it's more complicated than that, say

good1 -> good2  -> rubbish -> good3 -> good4 -> revertGood4 -> revertGood3 -> revertRubbish

You may have to do something like:

git reset HEAD~6  //Deletes last 6 commits
git cherry-pick good3
git cherry-pick good4

with a resulting history of

good1 -> good2  -> good3* -> good4*

The asterisks indicate the code changes will be the same, just with a different hash than the original commits.

answered Mar 24 '15 at 15:25

KevinL

Except then you are possibly rewriting public history, which is bad. – Roman Mar 24 '15 at 17:34
Yes, that is good to note that `git reset` should not be used on public history. If the OP has caught the problem before it made it into public space, or it is a repo with few contributors, then `git reset` is fine, in my opinion. Otherwise, OP will just have to be stuck with the messy pull request/revert/cherry-pick in the public history. – KevinL Mar 25 '15 at 14:11

2 Answers2