merging branches with separate but identical history

Hi list

I have two branches which start with the same commits, and I want to merge them. I believe the two branches were individually pulled from the same SVN repo, so they look like this:

branch1: a--b--c--d--e--f--1--3--5 branch2: a--b--c--d--e--f--2--4--6

If I do:

Merge made by recursive

The merge succeeds but the commits in each branch aren't squashed
together (git log shows two commits for each actual commit)
 i.e., now my history looks like this:

a--a--b--b--c--c--d--d--e--e--f--f--1--2--3--4--5--6

Is there a way to do this without the duplicates? (perhaps a way to mark the branch as merged up to 'f', without actually performing a merge?)

Thanks Craig de Stigter -- Koordinates Ltd PO Box 1604, Shortland St, Auckland, New Zealand Phone +64-9-966 0433 Fax +64-9-969 0045 Web http://www.koordinates.com

Hi,

Craig de Stigter wrote:

[...]

No.  I would suggest trying

 git cat-file commit a
 git cat-file commit A

where a and A are the two versions of "a" and comparing them. How do they differ?

If you don't care about superseding the old history and just want to combine the two branches into a single history, you can try something like this:

 $ git checkout branch1
 $ git rebase -i branch1~3 --onto branch2~3
 $ git merge branch2

If the history after the fork point is not linear, you can still do something very similar with grafts. See git-filter-branch(1) for details.

Hope that helps, Jonathan

Craig de Stigter <craig.destigter <at> koordinates.com> writes:

Hi.

[...]

Yes, you can use grafts (cf gitrepository-layout(5)) to rewrite the parent pointer for eg commit 2 from f(2) to f(1).