将git提交重组到不同的分支

Question

I am trying to reorganise my git tree so that it is structured a bit better. Basically at the moment I have a single master branch with a couple of small feature branches that split from it. I want to go back and reorder it so that the only commits in the main branch are the ones corresponding to new version numbers and then have all the in between commits reside in a separate develop branch from which the feature branches split from too. Basically I'm looking for a tool that will let me completely manually reorganise the tree. I thought maybe that interactive rebasing was what I was looking for but trying to do so in sourcetree makes it seem like it is not the right tool.

Can anyone give me some advice on how best to proceed. Below is a diagram of my current structure:

featureA                       x-x-x   
                              /     \
master     A-x-x-x-x-B-x-x-x-C       D

Desired structure:

feature                   x-x-x
                         /    |
develop     x-x-x-x-x-x-x    -
           /      |     |     |
master    A    -  B  -  C  -  D

Answer 1

Having a linear history -like your current structure- is something wanted by many people. If you really want to try this new workflow, what about adopting it from now on, without changing the past? It would save you some trouble.

However, if you really want to change it, you could do:

#Start to put tags on 'main' commits, to ease manipulations
git checkout B
git tag tagB
git checkout B
git tag tagB
git checkout D
git tag tagD

#Start to rewrite from the oldest
#Not much to do: we just need to add a merge commit
git checkout A
git merge --no-ff B
git branch -f master

#Continue with C
#Same thing, but we need to cherry-pick the intermediate commits
git checkout tagB
git cherry-pick C~3
git cherry-pick C~2
git cherry-pick C~1
git cherry-pick C
git merge --no-ff master
git branch -f master

#Continue with D
...

To ease those manipulations and to ensure you know what is going on, you should open a gitk --all HEAD in the background, and regularly press F5 to refresh it.

And if you think you messed up, and you want to retrieve the initial state, you'd just need to do

git checkout tagD
git branch -f master

A final word: if you already shared those commits (eg: if you already pushed), you should warn everyone likely to have them, that you're going to change the structure of the history. Otherwise it could lead to a real mess.