How to create a new branch without pre-merge remote-tracking commits in Git?

Question

Whenever I create a new branch (git checkout -b <newBranchName>), I use to get many commit logs:

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/master' into develop    e53c044

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/develop' into develop   feda328

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/develop' into develop   4bbd301

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/develop' into develop   4dfcfcb

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/develop' into develop   bfaccfb

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/develop' into develop   754c0ab

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/develop' into develop   b0454b0

Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/develop' into develop   f96182f

How can I create a branch without such logs?

Is this question what you asking for? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1384325/in-git-is-there-a-simple-way-of-introducing-an-unrelated-branch-to-a-repository — tsh, Nov 03 '17 at 03:01
Not sure what you're asking here, creating a new branch does not introduce any new commits, those commits (whose messages you see) must already be in your repository. Are they on the branch you branched *from*? — Lasse V. Karlsen, Nov 03 '17 at 07:46

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 03 '17 at 03:01

Maybe orphan parameter of git checkout could help you:

git checkout --orphan NEW_BRANCH

This will create a new branch named NEW_BRANCH with zero commits on it. But now all files stay in cache area, you could use "git rm --cached ..." to unstage:

git rm -r --cached .

-r here could unstage files recursively.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 03 '17 at 03:06

0

The commits for the new created branches are based on the parent branch you created from.

Such as if you create a new branch new from develop branch as below graph:

A---B---C   developer
         \
            new

When you show the logs for new branch, you will find the commits A, B and C are showed.

If you want to create the new branch without showing the parent commits, you can create an orphan branch (execute on develop branch):

git checkout --orphan new

Then there will have no commits on new branch. the commit history will as below:

A---B---C   developer

            new

If you want to create the new branch with only part of the commits for it's parent branch develop, you can use:

git checkout -b new <last commit you want to contain in new branch>

Such as if you want to contain only commits A and B in new branch, you can use the command git checkout -b new <commit id for B>, then the commit history will be:

A---B---C   developer
     \
       new

answered Nov 03 '17 at 03:06

Marina Liu

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Thanks! :) (earlier I was trying "git checkout --orphan -b new" and it was throwing some errors) – Sandeep Dubey Nov 03 '17 at 03:21
While making PR I'm getting "X and Y are entirely different commit histories." – Sandeep Dubey Nov 03 '17 at 03:38
You can merge the two related branch by command for first time: `git merge new --allow-unrelated-histories`. – Marina Liu Nov 03 '17 at 04:25
Can you merge the two branches successful now? Since the two branches has unrelated histories, after merge by command for first time, then you can merge through PR. – Marina Liu Nov 07 '17 at 09:53

How to create a new branch without pre-merge remote-tracking commits in Git?

2 Answers2