I have a working copy with a sparse checkout enabled. And I want to do the git rebase -i. But if I get conflict while rebasing all of the excluded from checkout files are marked as deleted and not staged for commit.
So, when I do resolve real conflicts and git add required files, I still can't do git rebase --continue due to unstaged changes. I can do git checkout -f -- <excluded files>, but it's very inconvenient.
Is there a better way to git-rebase with a sparse checkout?
I mentioned in "Git sparse checkout with exclusion", you now have the git sparse-checkout command.
By "now", I mean since Git 2.25+ (Q1 2020).
And, as I documented in "How to disable sparse checkout after enabled?", you can disable / re-enable a sparse checkout.
Since rebasing with a sparse-checkout is tricky (because the rebase operation works on the entire history and not just the files you have in your working directory), you can consider that disable/enable approach (with a more recent Git version than the 2015 one):
git branch backup-branch
git sparse-checkout disable
git rebase -i <base-branch>
# Resolve them as you normally would.
# After resolving, stage the changes:
git add <resolved-files>
git rebase --continue
# Re-enable the sparse-checkout
git sparse-checkout set <paths-or-patterns>
# Replace `<paths-or-patterns>` with the paths or patterns you had previously used.
If anything goes wrong, you can always switch back to your backup-branch to start over.
