Guru Das Srinagesh

How I used git rebase --onto

09 Nov 2023

On one of my daily trawlings of Hacker News, I came across Julia Evans' blogpost on confusing git terminology that lists git rebase --onto as one such confusing command. I had never used this --onto flag before and her description didn't really help me visualize the problem or the solution.

I shrugged and let it go, not thinking much of it at the time.

I ended up using it recently, when I had to rebase a feature branch based off a couple of weeks old, stale, master branch onto the up-to-date tip of the same master branch.


Since I was using Gerrit, my feature branch had a topic:XYZ set. This XYZ topic series of mine had about ~20 commits, and the master branch had advanced quite a bit with almost ~15K commits 1, some of which were also large merge commits.

My erstwhile strategy for cherrypicking the whole series onto the moving tip of the master branch was as follows:

git config pull.rebase true
git pull <server/project> <refs/changes/12345/4>

(where 12345 was the last change in the series)

This worked at the time I had published this strategy to our internal documentation at work so that other developers could make use of my XYZ series on top of the latest, up-to-date master branch. Over time, though, the series ran into a merge conflict once the master branch had advanced sufficiently enough. And that is when I was asked to rebase the series to fix this merge conflict and update the documentation.

When I tried the above instructions on top of the up-to-date master branch, it did not work because git tried to interactively rebase all the ~15K changes one by one and then somehow ran into merge conflicts on changes unrelated to mine. Resolving merge conflicts unrelated to my changes was a clear sign that I was doing something wrong — there had to be a better way.

After a bit of Googling, I found this answer 2 on Stack Overflow that succintly expressed what I had to do:

git rebase --onto <final_base_commit> <initial_base_commit> <head>

This was interesting. The fact that I had come across this recently was fresh in my mind, and hence I quickly consulted the man page for git-rebase:

First let’s assume your topic is based on branch next. For example, a feature
developed in topic depends on some functionality which is found in next.

        o---o---o---o---o  master
             \
              o---o---o---o---o  next
                               \
                                o---o---o  topic

We want to make topic forked from branch master; for example, because the
functionality on which topic depends was merged into the more stable master branch.
We want our tree to look like this:

        o---o---o---o---o  master
            |            \
            |             o'--o'--o'  topic
             \
              o---o---o---o---o  next

We can get this using the following command:

    git rebase --onto master next topic

Aha! When read alongside the man page, the Stack Overflow answer's recommendation started to make sense.

final_base_commit would be my current HEAD, i.e. the current (up-to-date) tip of the master branch.

initial_base_commit would be the parent of the first patch in my series. In my case, this was <SHA>^ where <SHA> was that of the first patch - easily available by inspection on Gerrit. Let's say this was 43487e7b567cfb^.

head would be the FETCH_HEAD after running git fetch on the last change in my series, i.e.

git fetch <server/project> <refs/changes/12345/4>

Thus, the final command became:

git rebase --onto HEAD 43487e7b567cfb^ FETCH_HEAD

The merge conflict I had to fix was fairly trivial, and I was done in no time.

I was really impressed by the power of this feature as I was dreading having to manually cherry-pick all of the ~20 changes in my series.


  1. This large number of changes is because the project was the Linux kernel actively being developed by a global team of developers.
  2. Git: Interactively rebase a range of commits - Stack Overflow

git


< Previous
Learning Go