Remove a merge commit, keeping current changes

Question

We have had a small problem in our team. One dev had to include some changes in our development branch. Before doing so, he accidentally merged a feature branch (which shouldn't be merged then) and kept on working over those changes, generating a couple of commits after the merge. Now we want to keep those changes, but apply them to the commit before the merge was done. To keep it clear: ``` A (+b, +a) | B (+a) | C (merge commit) |\ D \ | E (feature branch) | / |/ F ``` What we want to have his changes (+a,+b) applied over commit D . The equivalent to: ``` C (+a,+b) | D | E (feature branch) | / |/ F ``` How can we commit a change to dismiss a previous merge keeping local changes?

Accepted Answer

This is a job for `git rebase -i`. Run:

```
git rebase -i F
```

You'll be presented with a list of commits in `${EDITOR}`, like so:

```
pick 334ad92 D
pick fb54c42 E
pick 6901e51 B
pick 6c61a52 A

# Rebase eea2847..6c61a52 onto eea2847
#
# (more instructions here)
```

Delete the `pick fb54c42 E` line to remove that commit. (Also, if you want `A` and `B` to be combined into a single commit, you can change the `pick` command to `squash` -- `squash 6c61a52 A`). Save and close the file and your branches will be in the state you wish.

Note that this will change history. This means that you'll need to do a `git push -f` if you've already pushed the branch anywhere, and it'll mess with anyone else who's been collaborating on this branch. If that's an issue, you can `git revert` the merge commit instead:

```
git revert -m 1 C
```

The `-m 1` argument tells git to revert against the first parent of the commit, which is the side that was merged into (`D`, in your diagram).

Remove a merge commit, keeping current changes

Solution

Problem