Rebasing a Git merge commit

Question

Take the following case:

I have some work in a topic branch and now I\'m ready to merge back to master:

* eb3b733 3     [master] [origin/master]
| * b6         


        

Answer 1

Given that I just lost a day trying to figure this out and actually found a solution with the help of a coworker, I thought I should chime in.

We have a large code base and we have to deal with 2 branch heavily being modified at the same time. There is a main branch and a secondary branch if you which.

While I merge the secondary branch into the main branch, work continues in the main branch and by the time i'm done, I can't push my changes because they are incompatible.

I therefore need to "rebase" my "merge".

This is how we finally did it :

1) make note of the SHA. ex.: c4a924d458ea0629c0d694f1b9e9576a3ecf506b

git log -1

2) Create the proper history but this will break the merge.

git rebase -s ours --preserve-merges origin/master

3) make note of the SHA. ex.: 29dd8101d78

git log -1

4) Now reset to where you were before

git reset c4a924d458ea0629c0d694f1b9e9576a3ecf506b --hard

5) Now merge the current master into your working branch

git merge origin/master
git mergetool
git commit -m"correct files

6) Now that you have the right files, but the wrong history, get the right history on top of your change with :

git reset 29dd8101d78 --soft

7) And then --amend the results in your original merge commit

git commit --amend

Voila!