壁球后更改先前的提交消息，而不是推送

Question

My scenario: I tried squashing 3 commits, the messages from 2 got combined with the last commit before branching, I want to remove the dummy commit messages.

(Sorry the samples below aren't direct copies from the terminal, just my interpretations.)

I had 7 commits in a row. 3 of them were ones I wanted to squash before merging my branch back into master.

af7d12c31e123023425a7b6f88bd3d6f43103358 dummy commit 3
69ec87cf490313086627df5224a1bcdbd3e9addd KEEP THIS COMMIT 4
fd6c843d59451c017628d03f3b4674045f06e54a KEEP THIS COMMIT 3
9ec44b48384373cbc8571b6beba7fd094db03e93 KEEP THIS COMMIT 2
53b8a217a4dcc85fb74e7c57861253f801ff882a KEEP THIS COMMIT 1
914dc32f7882b2b459e46b35a9314aef1c6824ba dummy commit 2
290f261f9d1541967f491fe8cba0fdd085ad5c20 dummy commit 1 (1st one in branch)
98dfb5299b122e496aeae29142038894488f0871 LAST COMMIT BEFORE BRANCHING

I ran

git rebase --interactive 98dfb5299b122e496aeae29142038894488f0871

I then set the 3 dummy commits (1,2,3) to squash. Saved and rebase finished.

Now when I "git log", the commit message for 98dfb5299b122e496aeae29142038894488f0871 looks like:

commit 98dfb5299b122e496aeae29142038894488f0871
Author: <me>
Date:   Thu Apr 25 14:51:28 2013 -0700

    LAST COMMIT BEFORE BRANCHING

    dummy commit 1

    dummy commit 2

I ran git rebase again from the same commit, 98dfb5299b122e496aeae29142038894488f0871, and changed that commit to "reword" and changed the message but it didn't have any effect.

I have not pushed any of these changes yet, just committed locally on my branch.

Do I need to rebase again but from the parent of LAST COMMIT BEFORE BRANCHING?

Answer 1

To start, a few notes:

• if 98dfb529 was the last commit before branching (that is, it appeared both in master and in your branch), then setting the first and second commits of your branch as "squash" ( 290f261f and 914dc32f ) effectively moved the branching point one step before. This is because 98dfb529 does not exist anymore in your branch, and it has been replaced by a squashed 98dfb529 + 290f261f + 914dc32f (let's call it aaaaaaaa ). 98dfb529 , however, still exists in master.

• Then you decided to do the reword on aaaaaaaa . You changed the commit message. This change triggered a change in the commit hash itself, so now your branch contains bbbbbbbb instead of aaaaaaaa . aaaaaaaa , however, still exists around, even if it is not directly referenced by any branch: it will be deleted the next time that git triggers a garbage collection of dangling commits. Therefore, a git log aaaaaaaa will still show you the old message.

To recap, this is probably your current situation:

                          (..your branch..)
                          |
                          * af7d12c3  // Note however that these five commits
                          * 69ec87cf  // have now a different hash, because
                          * fd6c843d  // the history has been changed: when
(..master..)              * 9ec44b48  // the parent of a commit changes, then
|                         * 53b8a217  // the child's hash changes as well.
* 98dfb529   * aaaaaaaa   * bbbbbbbb
|            |            |
| __________/____________/
|/
(... previous history ...)