Hacker News Reader

Comment by elpakal | Hacker News Reader

If you really want just one commit on your PR you can reset your branch to its target before you merge:

git reset --soft <target>

Which will undo all commits and leave all modified files in the staging area. Then you can make one commit and force push it to replace your branch @ remote.

View on HN

Or just git rebase -i like normal people.

Not sure why downvoted, this is the "correct" way. Can also do --autosquash etc. at the same time.

what makes this more correct than the other way? if anything an interactive rebase requires a lot more ceremony

Throwing away the commit and doing it again can easily go wrong. It is easy to commit unintended changes by mistake.

The interactive rebase is a completely normal operation and intended for exactly this situation. It is also much easier to craft more than one commit, and last minute fixes of spelling errors and such things.

Careful here… if <target> is not in the ancestry of HEAD, resetting to it may have the effect of undoing any changes that have happened on the <target> branch that aren’t in yours.

To be safe, you can do:

    git reset $(git merge-base <target> HEAD)

Which puts HEAD at the last commit in common between your branch and <target>… which, if target is already a parent/ancestor of your commit, is the same thing. But if target has had changed since you branched from it, this prevents you from undoing any recent commits.

You could also rebase and squash all commits into a single one and then rewrite the commit message with git commit --amend.

Thanks for the tip, man! Really helpful indeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com