How to Git rebase interractively squash few commits before merge commit

Question

I have a feature branch that I want to merge with master. Before I do that, I would like to squash a few commits.

I already did a merge from master onto this feature branch to resolve the conflicts. The commits I want to squash are before the merge commit from master.

The merge contains 180 commits coming from master, and it was a big struggle to handle conflicts so I want to avoid redoing it while rebasing.

The git log is this:

A  
|  
B (merge commit)  
|  
C (22 commits from master)  
|  
X  
|  
Y  
|  
Z  
|  
D (coming from master)  
|
E (coming from master)  
|  
F (coming from master)  
|  
...  
... (more 155 commits from master)  
...  

I want to squash X and Y onto Z . When I do

git rebase -i HEAD~6

It is showing all the commits from master coming with the merge commit, so when I want to squash only X and Y , I need to resolve the conflicts once again.

How can I prevent that?

Answer 1

Try adding the -r | --rebase-merges -r | --rebase-merges to your rebase command:

git rebase -i -r HEAD~6

The sequencer script will look different, you will quickly figure out that it describes a way to describe how you want to replay your merges.

In your case: you just want to squash X , Y and Z together, you shouldn't have to edit the merge part.

---

The default behavior of git rebase (without -r ) is to:

1. ignore merge commits
2. replay all listed commits in a linear fashion

this is why your conflicts are triggered again