[git] Remove specific commit

The algorithm that Git uses when calculating diff's to be reverted requires that

  1. the lines being reverted are not modified by any later commits.
  2. that there not be any other "adjacent" commits later in the history.

The definition of "adjacent" is based on the default number of lines from a context diff, which is 3. So if 'myfile' was constructed like this:

$ cat >myfile <<EOF
line 1
junk
junk
junk
junk
line 2
junk
junk
junk
junk
line 3
EOF
$ git add myfile
$ git commit -m "initial check-in"
 1 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 myfile

$ perl -p -i -e 's/line 2/this is the second line/;' myfile
$ git commit -am "changed line 2 to second line"
[master d6cbb19] changed line 2
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

$ perl -p -i -e 's/line 3/this is the third line/;' myfile
$ git commit -am "changed line 3 to third line"
[master dd054fe] changed line 3
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

$ git revert d6cbb19
Finished one revert.
[master 2db5c47] Revert "changed line 2"
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

Then it all works as expected.

The second answer was very interesting. There is a feature which has not yet been officially released (though it is available in Git v1.7.2-rc2) called Revert Strategy. You can invoke git like this:

git revert --strategy resolve <commit>

and it should do a better job figuring out what you meant. I do not know what the list of available strategies is, nor do I know the definition of any strategy.

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