how to pull updates from remote repo, when filter-branch is used on local repo?

Question

for example i want to hack on the code of angularjs, so i simply clone it using git clone https://github.com/angular/angular.git , to simulate the update scenario, i would use git reset --hard HEAD~10 to discard recent commits, git pull works greatly after reset, because it can get updates from remote repo easily, but with filter-branch, git pull is painful, my question is how to deal with such painfulness.

since i can only hack on my own repo, sometime some of the original repo may have some directory that i don't want, for example some project may have node_modules in the repo, here i take the script folder as an example, i should remove using filter-branch on my local repo, but after git filter-branch --tree-filter "rm scripts -rf" , it's erroneous to get update from the original repo,

git pull after filter-branch, it's erroneous, and difficult to manage the conflicts.

so how to deal with repos that is not well managed that i have to use filter-branch remove operation, the problem is how to get update after filter-branche operation, is there a nice solution to this staff?

Answer 1

When you use filter-branch you change the commit hashes of every commit in the branch. This should be a last resort, not something you reach for regularly.

Instead, simply remove the directory from your repository using something like

git rm -r scripts

and then commit. This will create a new commit removing the scripts directory while keeping previous commits as they already exist.

Operations that "change" commits, including filter-branch , should be strongly avoided on shared commits. These kinds of operations cause all kinds of complications, some of which you are discovering now.