Everyone has war stories about git. They almost always involve letting a feature/topic branch get far out of date from the feature branch’s parent. My friend Sebastian has actually figured out a quick way to get out of what I call git hell.The best way to avoid that situation is incorporate git rebase and git rebase -i into your normal workflow. Basically, use git rebase periodically and right before you submit your merge request to make sure that your branch will cleanly play onto it’s parent integration branch. And use git rebase -i and git push –force if you need it, on your topic branch to keep a concise commit history as you build your topic deltas.
No matter what happens, you or someone on your team will end up in git hell where you are replaying a stack of commits so you can generate a clean commit history and publish your deltas. If you end up there, you need to understand that git merge is actually your friend. Sebastian suggests the following:
## Be safe, do this work on a test branch.
git checkout topic/branch
git checkout -b test-topic/branch
## Make sure the local copy of master is up-to-date.
git checkout master
git pull master
## Go back to your test branch and merge in master.
git checkout test-topic/branch
git merge master
## Reset your state to be that of master. This leaves your changes as
## an unstaged blob against master.
git reset masterAt this point your working directory should have all the changes from your topic branch unstaged against the HEAD of master
git diffshould confirm this. Now you can add what you want and write a new commit that performs the changes that you want comfortable in the knowledge that you aren’t undoing upstream changes. You’ll use git add and git commit to accomplish this. The difference is that your new set of change should apply cleanly to master. From here you can:
## When you are comfortable that you your test branch captures your
## deltas.
git checkout test-topic/branch
git branch -D topic/branch
git checkout -b topic/branch
git push --force
git branch -D test-topic/branchSebastian says “Have fun!”