How to merge a branch without also merging changes from previous branches

Question

I am kind of new to git and have a question regarding branching and merging those branches.

Let's say in my project repo I have 3 "main" branches: Alpha, Beta, Production.

Here is a scenario I am facing:

I currently work on the Alpha branch on my local machine. I create a new branch from Alpha, let's call it feature/newFeature . After creating the feature I commit and push the changes and then I merge feature/newFeature into the Alpha branch for QA to test. If QA approves, then it gets merged into Beta, then Production, etc.

Now, after feature/newFeature has been merged into Alpha (and not any other branch yet) I create another branch from Alpha, call it fix/hotfix . After fixing what needs to be fixed I merge this branch into Alpha as well.

But (and here is the problem I am facing), let's say that fix/hotfix has been tested and is working and can be merged into Beta, but feature/newFeature is still being tested on Alpha. If I try to merge the fix/hotfix branch into Beta, it will also merge changes from the feature/newFeature branch into Beta (which I obviously don't want because it is still being tested).

I understand why this happens, because when I merge feature/newFeature into Alpha and then create the fix/hotfix branch from Alpha after that merge, the fix/hotfix branch also contains the changes from the feature/newFeature branch.

My question is: Is there any way to do it in such a way that I can merge the fix/hotfix branch into Beta without it also merging the previous branches/changes that shouldn't be merged yet?

Answer 1

You can always copy fix/hotfix branch and rebase it onto beta

git checkout fix/hotfix
git checkout -b fix/hotfix-copy
git rebase beta

That should leave you with the hotfix changes on beta branch. Then just merge the hotfix