OK, I thought this was a simple git scenario, what am I missing?
I have a master
branch and a feature
branch. I do some work on master
, some on feature
, and then some more on master
. I end up with something like this (lexicographic order implies the order of commits):
A--B--C------F--G (master)
\
D--E (feature)
I have no problem to git push origin master
to keep the remote master
updated, nor with git push origin feature
(when on feature
) to maintain a remote backup for my feature
work. Up until now, we're good.
But now I want to rebase feature
on top of the F--G
commits on master, so I git checkout feature
and git rebase master
. Still good. Now we have:
A--B--C------F--G (master)
\
D'--E' (feature)
Problem: the moment I want to backup the new rebased feature
branched with git push origin feature
, the push is rejected since the tree has changed due to the rebasing. This can only be solved with git push --force origin feature
.
I hate using --force
without being sure I need it. So, do I need it? Does the rebasing necessarily imply that the next push
should be --force
ful?
This feature branch is not shared with any other devs, so I have no problem de facto with the force push, I'm not going to lose any data, the question is more conceptual.
Best Answer
The problem is that
git push
assumes that remote branch can be fast-forwarded to your local branch, that is that all the difference between local and remote branches is in local having some new commits at the end like that:When you perform
git rebase
commits D and E are applied to new base and new commits are created. That means after rebase you have something like that:In that situation remote branch can't be fast-forwarded to local. Though, theoretically local branch can be merged into remote (obviously you don't need it in that case), but as
git push
performs only fast-forward merges it throws and error.And what
--force
option does is just ignoring state of remote branch and setting it to the commit you're pushing into it. Sogit push --force origin feature-branch
simply overridesorigin/feature-branch
with localfeature-branch
.In my opinion, rebasing feature branches on
master
and force-pushing them back to remote repository is OK as long as you're the only one who works on that branch.