Re: How to rebase and rename?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 10:05:10AM +0100, Peter Krefting wrote:

> If I have a repository with a topic branch that is published, and
> that I want to rebase and republish under a new name, is there an
> easy way of doing that?
> [...]
> Currently, I do something along the lines of:
> 
>  git branch topic-2 topic-1
>  git rebase master topic-2
> 
> but that feels wrong as it creates the "topic-2" branch pointing the
> the wrong way first. Is there a way to eliminate that step?

No, I think that is the best way to do it. Since the creation of topic-2
is happening in your (presumably) private repo, it is not a big deal for
it to exist in an unintertesting state for a few seconds.

If you really cared, you could do the work on a detached HEAD and then
assign the result to a new branch, but that is even more typing:

  git checkout topic-1^0
  git rebase master
  git checkout -b topic-2

It also causes git to do slightly more work. In your example, the branch
creation is O(1), then rebase resets back to master and applies each
commit in topic-1 in turn. In mine, we actually reset the checkout to
topic-1, then reset it to master, and then apply the commits. Not that
it probably matters unless you have some enormous repository.

-Peff