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I have done something really weird. And I don't know what to do know.

I am working with Gerrit, and it just showed me that it cannot merge because of a conflict, but there were no conflicts, but instead I guess it was because of detached HEAD

And I started to do really random thing, firstly I cherry-picked 3 commits into one, and than I got the master branch again detached, that I tried to rebase, but got a merge conflict, so finally I got the following log

https://i.stack.imgur.com/6N6Tt.jpg

This is because I don't understand the difference between merge and rebase

Could you please help me to fix the history (into one straight line) and answer the question :

What is the difference between merge and rebase if by default git uses fast-forward so the result looks exactly the same as rebase does. And in my case I couldn't make the rebase because of merge conflicts. So what is the purpose of rebase than ?

boardtc
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1 Answers1

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Rebase is different from merge because git uses fast-forward only if it can. E.g.: you create a new branch from master, you commit to your new branch, you don't commit to master, and then you want to merge your changes back to master: git will think this is the same as if you'd have just committed to master anyway. And it'll think the same if you'd use rebase in this situation.

The real fun begins when you have changes on both branches and git can't use fast-forward: then merge will create a new commit for which the parents will be your last commits on both of your branches, and rebase will try to move the base of your branch that you're trying to rebase to the head of your other branch.

So, to "fix" your history (into one straight line), you need to undo your merge (labeled as head) and you need to rebase your Rebasing branch to your master branch

git checkout Rebasing
git rebase master

You'll still have conflicts, that you need to resolve and continue with 

git rebase --continue

as many times as necessary.

ytg
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