git: squash/fixup earlier commit

Question

Suppose you have:

A-B-C

Now your build/test fails. The fix should be merged in A. My current work-flow is like this:

$ git         


        

Answer 1

What you are doing is dangerous if you are sharing the branch on which you are making changes with other people. In your case, you are rewriting commit A and rebasing B and C on top of the new A, which is a completely new object. Anyone who had already pulled the old A into their repositories could end up corrupting their repository as the history in your repository will have "magically" changed. Their git would have no way of knowing that the history has been rewritten.

Because of this fact, the Git developers have intentionally not made this easy to do as you must be aware of the consequences of doing such an operation.