There are 2 steps to achieving this: Create a new empty commit Rewrite history to start from this empty commit We’ll put the new empty commit on a temporary branch newroot for convenience. 1. Create a new empty commit There is a number of ways you can do this. Using just plumbing The cleanest approach … Read more
As of Git version 1.7.12, you may now use git rebase -i –root Documentation
As of git 1.6.2, you can use git rebase –root -i. For each commit except the first, change pick to squash.
Git 1.7.2 introduced the ability to cherry pick a range of commits. From the release notes: git cherry-pick learned to pick a range of commits (e.g. cherry-pick A..B and cherry-pick –stdin), so did git revert; these do not support the nicer sequencing control rebase [-i] has, though. To cherry-pick all the commits from commit A … Read more
Merge commits: retains all of the commits in your branch and interleaves them with commits on the base branch Merge Squash: retains the changes but omits the individual commits from history Rebase: This moves the entire feature branch to begin on the tip of the master branch, effectively incorporating all of the new commits in … Read more
TL;DR A git rebase workflow does not protect you from people who are bad at conflict resolution or people who are used to a SVN workflow, like suggested in Avoiding Git Disasters: A Gory Story. It only makes conflict resolution more tedious for them and makes it harder to recover from bad conflict resolution. Instead, … Read more
As with a normal git rebase, git with –preserve-merges first identifies a list of commits made in one part of the commit graph, and then replays those commits on top of another part. The differences with –preserve-merges concern which commits are selected for replay and how that replaying works for merge commits. To be more … Read more
Short Version Merge takes all the changes in one branch and merges them into another branch in one commit. Rebase says I want the point at which I branched to move to a new starting point So when do you use either one? Merge Let’s say you have created a branch for the purpose of … Read more
The easiest way would be to find the head commit of the branch as it was immediately before the rebase started in the reflog… git reflog and to reset the current branch to it (with the usual caveats about being absolutely sure before reseting with the –hard option). Suppose the old commit was HEAD@{2} in … Read more
Delete commits from a branch in Git