Re: Odd merge behaviour involving reverts

On Thu, 18 Dec 2008, Alan wrote:

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.

		Linus