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In our project every developer solves his issues in own branches. And it happens that somebody makes a mistake and wants to execute git commit --amend after pushing his branch to remote repo.

Question: is this dangerous or not? Will other developers loose their progress?

xamgore
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1 Answers1

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git commit --amend essentially rewrites history; specifically, the most recent commit. This is generally safe IF and only if you have not yet pushed this commit to a common branch (ie. merge to master) that everyone else pulls from OR if you absolutely know for sure that no one else has merged or based his own work on the work done from your branch.

So, to summarize, it is safe to amend if the following conditions are true:

  • No one has pulled your branch and based his own work on your work.
  • You have not yet merged your own branch into the common master or develop branch.

If you cannot meet any of those conditions, then do not push an amend commit as this will result in a lot of confusions to anyone who has ever pulled your branch prior to the amend.

To answer the following part of your question more specifically:

(after pushing his branch to remote repo)

It really depends on what you refer to as "remote repo". If it is simply his own local branch on the remote repository and no one has pulled his branch into their own branch yet, then this is perfectly safe to do as he will merely be modifying his own remote repository that nobody else uses. If by "remote repo" you actually meant the remote master branch, then this is NOT safe to do as everyone else on the project will probably use that branch to create their own local branches for new work.

Edward L.
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