Moving commits from one branch to another (improving my git fu!)

Hi All,

I'm in a bit of a pickle! :) So I've come to ask for help from the guru's here.

My story is not unique but somehow the various suggested solutions don't seem to work in my case.

* I was working on a feature which was supposed to be done off our
'dev' branch. But instead I forgot and branched out my topic branch
from master (or as we call it 'stable').
* I did 2 commits and finished off my work. Only later realizing that
it had to be done off 'dev'.
* Now I want to move my 2 commits (which are the top 2 commits on my
topic branch) to a new branch which is branched off 'dev'.

$ git branch
* topicA
* stable
* dev

topicA was based on stable. But now I want to base it dev.

So I did what was most suggested, i.e use 'git rebase --onto'.

Here's what I did when I was in topicA:

$ git rebase dev stable topicA (this was suggested in the manpage as well).

This started off a massive rebase operation, because the 'dev' branch is vastly diverged from stable, and a lot of conflicts started appearing.

I'm not sure if I'm doing it right here, so can anyone suggest whether this is right or do I need to do it differently?

PS: Please CC me (mandeepsandhu.chd@gmail.com) in your reply as I'm
not currently subscribed to the list.

Thanks for your time.

Regards, -mandeep