Re-doing a reverted merge in Git

Question

I have run into a bit of a problem here  I had a problem-specific branch 28s in Git  that I merged in the general develop branch  Turns out I had done it too fast  so I used git-revert to undo the merge  Now  however  the time has come to merge 28s into develop  but git-merge command sees the original merge  and happily announces that all is well and branches have been already merged  What do I do now  Create a  Revert  Revert  28s -  develop     commit  Doesn t seem to be a good way to do it  but I can t imagine any other at the moment   What the tree structure looks like

User · Answer

Instead of using git-revert you could have used this command in the devel branch to throw away  undo  the wrong merge commit  instead of just reverting it    git checkout devel git reset --hard COMMIT BEFORE WRONG MERGE   This will also adjust the contents of the working directory accordingly  Be careful     Save your changes in the develop branch  since the wrong merge  because they too will be erased by the git-reset  All commits after the one you specify as the git reset argument will be gone  Also  don t do this if your changes were already pulled from other repositories because the reset will rewrite history    I recommend to study the git-reset man-page carefully before trying this   Now  after the reset you can re-apply your changes in devel and then do   git checkout devel git merge 28s   This will be a real merge from 28s into devel like the initial one  which is now erased from git s history

User · Answer

You have to  revert the revert   Depending on you how did the original revert  it may not be as easy as it sounds  Look at the official document on this topic   ---o---o---o---M---x---x---W---x---Y                       ---A---B-------------------C---D   to allow   ---o---o---o---M---x---x-------x-------                                                ---A---B-------------------C---D      But does it all work  Sure it does  You can revert a merge  and from a   purely technical angle  git did it very naturally and had no real   troubles    It just considered it a change from  state before merge  to    state after merge   and that was it    Nothing complicated  nothing odd    nothing really dangerous  Git will do it without even thinking about it       So from a technical angle  there s nothing wrong with reverting a merge    but from a workflow angle it s something that you generally should try to   avoid       If at all possible  for example  if you find a problem that got merged   into the main tree  rather than revert the merge  try really hard to          bisect the problem down into the branch you merged  and just fix it     or try to revert the individual commit that caused it          Yes  it s more complex  and no  it s not always going to work  sometimes   the answer is   oops  I really shouldn t have merged it  because it wasn t   ready yet  and I really need to undo all of the merge    So then you   really should revert the merge  but when you want to re-do the merge  you   now need to do it by reverting the revert

User · Answer

create new branch at commit prior to the original merge - call it it  develop-base  perform interactive rebase of  develop  on top of  develop-base    even though it s already on top    During interactive rebase  you ll have the opportunity to remove both the merge commit  and the commit that reversed the merge  i e  remove  both events from git history   At this point you ll have a clean  develop  branch to which you can merge your feature brach as you regularly do

User · Answer

To revert the revert without screwing up your workflow too much    Create a local trash copy of develop Revert the revert commit on the local copy of develop Merge that copy into your feature branch  and push your feature branch to your git server    Your feature branch should now be able to be merged as normal when you re ready for it   The only downside here is that you ll a have a few extra merge revert commits in your history

User · Answer

Let s assume you have such history   ---o---o---o---M---W---x-------x-------                                              ---A---B   Where  A  B failed commits and W - is revert of M  So before I start fixing found problems I do cherry-pick of W commit to my branch  git cherry-pick -x W   Then I revert W commit on my branch  git revert W    After I can continue fixing    The final history could look like   ---o---o---o---M---W---x-------x-------                                                     ---A---B---W---W ----------C---D   When I send a PR it will clearly shows that PR is undo revert and adds some new commits

User · Answer

I would suggest you to follow below steps to revert a revert  say SHA1    git checkout develop  go to develop branch git pull              get the latest from remote develop branch git branch users yourname revertOfSHA1  having HEAD referring to develop git checkout users yourname revertOfSHA1  checkout the newly created branch git log --oneline --graph --decorate  find the SHA of the revert in the history  say SHA1 git revert SHA1 git push --set-upstream origin users yourname revertOfSHA1  push the changes to remote   Now create PR for the branch users yourname revertOfSHA1

User · Answer

To revert a revert in GIT   git revert  lt commit-hash-of-previous-revert gt

User · Answer

I just found this post when facing the same problem  I find above wayyy to scary to do reset hards etc   I ll end up deleting something I don t want to  and won t be able to get it back     Instead I checked out the commit I wanted the branch to go back to e g  git checkout 123466t7632723  Then converted to a branch git checkout my-new-branch   I then deleted the branch I didn t want any more   Of course this will only work if you are able to throw away the branch you messed up

[git] Re-doing a reverted merge in Git

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-merge

Examples related to git-revert