Re: got myself into trouble; now what? - how to revert once you've pushed

> On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 02:37:19PM -0500, Robert Buck wrote:
>
>> We have two branches: master, feature/wixinstall
>>
>> Apparently a merge happened from the branch to master (and I am pretty
>> sure I never typed `git merge...`). But alas, a merge somehow happened
>> and got pushed.
>
> Did you run "git pull", which is basically fetch+merge?
>
>> Then I followed the Git Pro documentation, which said to do this...
>>
>>     git revert -m 1 [sha_of_C8]
>>
>> Now I am left with a bigger mess. When I merge master to the branch,
>> all the newly added files on the branch got deleted (not what I
>> wanted). Somehow git is interpreting the revert literally as a
>> sequence of deletes which it incorrectly then applies to the work on
>> the branch.
>
> Yeah. That reverts the merge, in essence creating a new tree built on
> top of the merge without the results of the merge. But when you try to
> re-merge between those two branches, it sees that history has already
> combined, and then afterwards eliminated the result. Which is not what
> you wanted.
>
> Read the section "reverting the revert" directly below the advice you
> followed:
>
>  http://progit.org/2010/03/02/undoing-merges.html
>
>> What I really wanted the revert to do is restore the history of the
>> world immediately prior to the merge. But now I have a branch I can't
>> merge into at all without losing a weeks work.
>>
>> How can I get out of this mess?
>
> If you can accept that history will be rewritten (which is a problem if
> people have built on top of your bogus merge), then what you want is:
>
>  git checkout master
>  git reset --hard $SHA1_OF_MERGE^
>
> and then re-push.