git bisect with feature branches / later commits are needed to build

Question

I'm trying to bisect a bug in the master branch, but the code from my feature branch is needed for my project/test to build. I've rebased my feature branch against the (buggy) master branch and noticed that a commit from the last few days in master has introduced a bug. When I do git bisect bad in my feature branch and git bisect good some-commit-in-master-last-week, git checks out a point in master - but now I can't compile and test if the problem still persists, because the patches in my feature branch are missing. Can I get git to only revert an individual patch, and then going back to HEAD?

Answer 1

the solution is to run

git diff master feature | patch -p1

after each step.

Answer 2

You can modify the current checked-out commit, at each bisect point, in any way you like; just don't make a new commit from it, and then git reset --hard HEAD to undo the change after testing. See the example of merging in the hot-fix branch in the git bisect documentation. This allows fully automated bisect testing (again, see docs).