Preserve merge changes with rebase -p

Hi all,

I needed to change the author of a commit that was before a merge in the history. Here is a figure of my situation, E being the commit I want to edit, and M the problematic merge commit:

     o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
              \       \ 
               o---E---M---o---o  topic

In a simple case, git rebase -i -p from topic does the trick here, I can amend E and M is re-created correctly.

The thing is, my M was not a "simple merge commit", but contained some changes needed for the code in master and topic to work together. In that case, git rebase -i -p recreates a merge commit, but it does not keep the changes introduced in M.

Is there any way to keep the M's changes in my case (except to manually patch & amend the re-created merge commit) ? If not, maybe it would be a nice functionnality to implement ?

Cheers,
  Matteo

P.S.: Please CC me if you answer to this e-mail, as I'm not subscribed to the list.

On 06/21/2011 08:11 AM, Matteo Cypriani wrote:

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any nice way to do it right now. I think what you could do for now is make the "pick <M>" into a "edit <M>", together with other changes you want to make. And then when you get to "edit M", do a "git cherry-pick -n -m 1 <M>", or "-m 2" depending on how your merge was done. That should bring your changes over. Then you just need resolve and add any conflicts, and do a "rebase --continue".

I've only tried it on a simple case and that seems to work.

I imagine this is pretty useful feature to have too. I could look into adding this support when I got a chance. I haven't given it much thought yet though, so I don't know how feasible it is.

Le mardi 21 juin 2011 16:44:48, Andrew Wong a écrit :

Thank you, I'll try that the next time.

That would be great, many thanks in advance!

Cheers,

  Matteo