Re: Help understanding "rebase"

> Here is the situation:  An old topic branch containing 3 commits.  A dev
> branch that has recently been merged.  To catch up the topic's work
> before adding it to dev, I expected that rebase would do what I ended up
> doing manually, detailed below.
> 
> Instead, it crunched away for a long time and gave errors applying patches.
> 
> So I did it manually by checking out dev, then cherry-picking each of
> the three commits. Actually, this left it on top of dev, but suppose I
> had created a new branch at dev, cherry-picked the stuff from the old
> topic branch, and then deleted the old topic branch.  Now I have a new
> topic branch with the rebased changes, albeit with a different branch
> name.  Point is, there were no conflicts and the changes were simple, so
> cherry-picking each node was clean.
> 
> So, what did the rebase command try to do?  I think it may have
> something to do with finding a common root between the topic and dev,
> which, due to the merge, was a long way back.  Something like this:
> 
>       o--o--   ...  --o
>      /                 \
>     A--...--B--   ... --C--D <== dev
>              \
>                   q--r--s  <== topic
> 
> 
> I was able to cherry-pick q,r,s on top of D without any issues.  So why
> did rebase get in such a tizzy?