3

I will develop my app in branch dev and provide the "best so far" (a release on GitHub) on a branch public.

The branch dev will have commits c964dea, 06cf8ee, 396b4a3 and 9be7fdb. I would like to squash them into a single commit on branch public (leaving them as-it on the branch dev).

Is this possible?

I saw many questions and answers about squashing commits, but none of tehem seemed to address the problem of "squashing to another branch".

Improve this question
4
  • Conceptually, just squash into one commit- then cherry-pick the commit onto the target branch. Or cherry-pick the 4 commits to the target branch and then squash. There may be a one liner for this but I can't think of it at the moment.
    – TTT
    Commented Sep 20, 2021 at 18:55
  • I'm pretty sure this is what you want: Cherry-pick and squash a range of commits into a subdirectory or subtree
    – TTT
    Commented Sep 20, 2021 at 18:59
  • @TTT well not exactly - I want to do that to another branch. Calum's answer is on spot (I need to test that with back-and-forth branches but I thnk it will be fine)
    – WoJ
    Commented Sep 22, 2021 at 9:13
  • Yeah- The question I linked to is slightly different. I should have mentioned that the accepted answer is probably what you want. Basically if you use -n parameter with cherry-pick you can avoid the additional rebase afterwards. But if Calum's answer here is correct, then maybe public didn't exist yet. (I just assumed branch public already existed which is why cherry-pick with -n would be slightly faster).
    – TTT
    Commented Sep 22, 2021 at 14:05

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

Create and switch to a new branch from dev.

git switch -c <new-branch>

It'll be identical to dev at this point but now you can squash the commits without changing dev. Start an interactive rebase.

git rebase -i <first-commit>

Then set all the commits to squash.

Improve this answer
1

you probably want first to cherry pick individual commits, if they are not in sequence by running :

git cherry-pick <commitSHA>

You will have a sequence of cherry-picked commits on your feature branch. after that you want to do interactive rebase on your branch from all the commits you cherry-picked.

git rebase -i HEAD~<n+1>

where n is going to be the number of cherry-picked commits. mark all the commits with s except the last one. s, squash = use commit, but meld into previous commit

if all your commits that you want to cherry-pick are in sequence, then it is easier :

git cherry-pick A^..B

where A and B are first and last commits to be cherry-picked. After that rebase them.

Improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.