Edit the root commit in Git?

Question

There's ways to change the message from later commits:

git commit --amend                    # for the most recent commit
git rebase --interactive master~2     # but requires *parent*

How can you change the commit message of the very first commit (which has no parent)?

Answer 1

Assuming that you have a clean working tree, you can do the following.

# checkout the root commit
git checkout <sha1-of-root>

# amend the commit
git commit --amend

# rebase all the other commits in master onto the amended root
git rebase --onto HEAD HEAD master