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I observed an unexpected behavior in an interactive rebase today. It was always my understanding that if I run an interactive rebase and don't change anything in the editor, it should not have any effect, but apparently that's not so (at least on a specific repo im working with which sadly I cannot share).

Lets say we have

A -> B -> C -> D <--HEAD

and I run git rebase -i A I expect to see

pick B
pick C
pick D

but in the repo I'm working on I got

pick C
pick B
pick D

instead. If I close the editor and git does its thing, the result is:

A -> C' -> B' -> D' <--HEAD

Does anybody know what circumstances might lead to a behavior like that?

Dani Gehtdichnixan
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    They should indeed be in topo order. To make sure you're seeing topo order, use `git log --graph` or `git log --topo-order`. If they're not properly sorted, that's a bug. – torek Nov 28 '22 at 11:30

1 Answers1

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I suspect you inspected your history by running git log.

When your intention is to view the history of your repo (with your own human eyes, as opposed to using git log to extract data for a script), I strongly suggest to add the --graph option, otherwise you are "history blind" and do not see how commits are related to one another :

# a very handy command to view your repo's history:
git log --oneline --graph

# Someone once said he aliased this to 'git lol' and I stuck with it:
git config --global alias.lol "log --oneline --graph"

git lol
git lol master origin/master
git lol --all
...

You describe something you can see if your history contains a merge commit of some sort :

* D
* merged
|\
| * C
* | B
|/
* A
LeGEC
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  • Ah that was it. Obvious in hindsight, came in with the wrong assumptions of what had previously happened on the branch. Thanks for the info! – Dani Gehtdichnixan Nov 28 '22 at 13:49