I'm in a situation where some changes made in a feature branch are not reflected in master, even though this branch was merged into it. I'm at a loss to understand why. For simplicity, let's say this commit has a hash "A" and changed file "file"
This can probably best be illustrated by the following commands:
$ git checkout master $ git branch --contains A * master feature_branch $ git log file | grep A (no output) $ git checkout feature_branch $ git log file | grep A A
Can anyone explain what's going on here? More importantly, is there anything that can be done to prevent this in the future?
EDIT:
As mentioned by a few people, the following does show the commit:
$ git checkout master $ git log --follow file | grep A A
But the thing is... the file was not renamed. So that doesn't fully explain things, either..
You are a victim of an evil merge.
Here is how to reproduce it
git init testrepo cd testrepo touch initial git add initial git commit -m 'initial commit' git checkout -b feature_branch echo "A" >> file git add file git commit -m 'file committed' git checkout master
Now do an interactive merge as if there were merge conflicts
git merge --no-commit --no-ff feature_branch
and move the file file (evil merge).
testrepo (master|MERGING) git mv file someOtherFile git commit
Now you will see that branch master contains the commit (in my case 9469682) that introduced file file
git branch --contains 9469682 feature_branch * master
But a git log will not show it, because it was moved
git log -- file (no output)
Use
git log --follow -- file
and the commit appears again.
Also keep in mind that the merge can get more evil. If the file's content also changed a lot than èven git log --follow will not detect it, because of the rename threshold.
In this case use git log --follow --find-renames= to adjust the rename threshold.
If generating diffs, detect and report renames for each commit. For following files across renames while traversing history, see --follow. If n is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file’s size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn’t changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
If somehow the location of the file has changed, you might need to tell git log to follow:
$ git checkout master $ git log --follow -- file | grep A
You can check if there is a difference between git log --oneline -- file and git log --oneline --follow -- file, to see if the file has been relocated.
