gitgithubrebasepull-request

Why does a pull request show extra commits after a rebase?

So I started with a pull request that was a few commits ahead of develop, let's call this branch feature.

feature had 1 merge conflict with develop. So I decided to rebase it and resolve the conflict.

  1. git checkout develop git pull
  2. git checkout feature git pull
  3. git rebase develop
  4. Merge conflict fixed - New commit added
  5. git rebase --continue
  6. Rebase successfull.
  7. git push (i was actually using "Synchronize Changes")

After these steps, the PR on GitHub went from having 7 commits, to having 60+ commits.

I would have expected it to only go from 7 to 8 commits, since I fixed one conflict.

Any idea about what happened and how (if needed) to fix it?

I can post additional info if required.

Solution

  • Take a look at your branch's git log and try to find anything out of the ordinary.

    One comment mentioned using git log, but you can also use git log --graph --oneline to get a visual representation of your branch's commit history. If your branch was rebased correctly, you would see something along the lines of:

    * 5eccc30d1 (HEAD -> feature, origin/feature) # Your commit message 8
* 5f73d262a # Your commit message 7
* 6c636b744 # Your commit message 6
* 97e17a7cf # ...
* 596297507 # ...
* 4646ce633 # ...
* 9fb61eb95 # ...
* 38dab17ae # Your commit message 1
*   7532142f7 (origin/develop) Merge pull request #...
|\
| * 042303c7e Add feature
* |   008f1e53b Merge pull request #...
|\ \
| * | 5a398f715 Fix issue with #...
# And so on

    Compare with this and try to find anything out of the ordinary. The commit below your first commit should be your base branch, and there should be no commits mixed in among the ones your wrote.

    I suspect there might be an issue with using git pull with your feature branch. If you are working on this PR yourself there shouldn't be reason to do this, and something could be going wrong because of it.

    If you need to pull with your feature branch, try using git pull --rebase instead, which is equivalent to a fetch and a rebase, instead of a fetch and a merge. This ensures your local commits stay on top of your history, in case there are differences between your local branch and your origin.