Instead of rebasing, etc....?

Instead of rebasing, etc....?

[Dave Abrahams]

I often find myself pursuing a development branch that I'm pushing out
to a public repo, and then wanting to go back a few commits and start
the end of the branch anew.

o-o-o-o origin/dev
      \
       o-o-o dev

Of course then I want to push dev and move origin/dev to refer to it.
So I delete and recreate origin/dev.  That's essentially like
rebasing, and all the advice says "don't do it."  How bad is that,
really, if it's my own development branch?

If I try to avoid doing that I guess I have to "merge" with the remote
branch but discard all its changes?

o-o-o-o - - - -o origin/dev dev
       \      / 
        o-o-o 


Is there a shortcut for that?  It would be nice if Git had a way to
note that sort of "false parentage" (the dotted line above)
explicitly; it's not really there logically; it just helps the
workflows to move along smoothly.

Re: Instead of rebasing, etc....?

[Dave Abrahams]

Dave Abrahams <dave <at> boostpro.com> writes:

> 
> I often find myself pursuing a development branch ...

Sorry, my ASCII art was messed up in the previous message.  
Here's what I meant:

o-o-o-o origin/dev
   \
    o-o-o dev


o-o-o-o - -o origin/dev dev
   \      / 
    o-o-o 

Re: Instead of rebasing, etc....?

[Raja R Harinath]

Hi,

Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:

> Dave Abrahams <dave <at> boostpro.com> writes:
>
>> I often find myself pursuing a development branch ...
>
> Sorry, my ASCII art was messed up in the previous message.  
> Here's what I meant:
>
> o-o-o-o origin/dev
>    \
>     o-o-o dev
>
>
> o-o-o-o - -o origin/dev dev
>    \      / 
>     o-o-o 

You can use the 'ours' merge strategy.

On the 'dev' branch, you do

   git merge -s ours origin/dev

Now 'origin/dev' is a parent of the new 'dev', while the tree contents
haven't changed.  You can now push 'dev' back to origin without any
hassles.

- Hari

Re: Instead of rebasing, etc....?

[Ramkumar Ramachandra]

Hi,

> Of course then I want to push dev and move origin/dev to refer to it.
> So I delete and recreate origin/dev.  That's essentially like
> rebasing, and all the advice says "don't do it."  How bad is that,
> really, if it's my own development branch?

If I understand correctly, you want a non-FF push. Simply develop on
dev and `git push origin +dev:dev` to force a non-FF push. It's not
bad at all if your branch isn't public and others aren't pulling from
it.

-- Ram