Re: Odd merge behaviour involving reverts

> On Thu, 18 Dec 2008, Alan wrote:
>> 
>> What am i doing wrong here?
>
> Reverting a merge is your problem.
>
> You can do it, but you seem to have done it without understanding what it 
> causes.
>
> A revert of a merge becomes a regular commit that just undoes everything 
> that the merge did in your branch. When you then do the next merge, you'll 
> do that merge with that in mind, so now git will essentially consider the 
> previous merge to be the base line, but your revert undid everything that 
> that one brought in, so the new merge will really only contain the new 
> stuff from the branch you are merging. 
>
> So if a merge causes problems, you generally should either undo it 
> _entirely_ (ie do a 'git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD'), not revert it. 
>
> Of course, if you had already made the merged state public, or done 
> development on top of it, you can't really do that. In which case a revert 
> works, but if you want it back, you should revert the revert, not merge 
> the branch again - because what you merged last time you threw away, and 
> won't be applied again.