So I have a situation with a master and a bugfix branch that continues it. I tried squashing some commits on master and then rebasing bugfix on it but I got merge conflicts. What is the proper way to do it ? I work locally and there is no remote.
It looks like this :
A - B - C - D - E - F [master]
\
G - H - I - J - K [bugfix]
I want to squash A - B - C - D - E - F and still have bugfix continuing the squashed master branch.
Jubob's point about shared history is a very important one, as rebasing or squashing shared commits is strongly discouraged.
I will assume that you are working with local commits.
Suppose you started with this:
[master] A---B---C---D
\
[bugfix] 1---2---3
and you decided to squash B, C and D into a new commit D'
[master] A---D'
\
[bugfix] B---C---D---1---2---3
Note that commits B, C and D remain in the bugfix branch. If you simply rebase bugfix onto master, Git will try to do this:
[master] A---D'
\
[bugfix] B---C---D---1---2---3
But the changes introduced by B, C and D are already contained in D'. What you really want to end up with is this:
[master] A---D'
\
[bugfix] 1---2---3
You can accomplish this with the --onto option of rebase:
git rebase --onto master D bugfix
D should be the latest commit in bugfix that should not be included when rebasing.