I'm working on a separate branch for a feature.
Now I want this feature in my main branch, but just having all the commits squashed to a single one (with a recap into the commit message).
The thing is that I already pushed the branch to remote.
So I'm not sure if I can perform a git merge --squash feature (from the main branch) or if that could rewrite my git history.
I don't get if git merge --squash will just create a new commit (containing, as a patch, all the changes of my merged branch. So in a safe way), or if it will remove the old commits from my branch or just do any alteration to the git history. (I want to avoid that cause I work in team).
Should I maybe opt for a commit-range cherry-pick, instead of a git squash? (but the cherry-pick would just copy all the commits without squashing them)
Or merging with squash is fine? (even after a push to the remote feature-branch)
--squash) in my main branch, but without rewriting the history.No history is rewritten. From the high-level commands, only git rebase and git commit --amend perform history rewrites.
git merge --squash simply prepares a working tree that contains all information from the branch you want to merge, just as the documentation says:
Produce the working tree and index state as if a real merge happened (except for the merge information), but do not actually make a commit or move the HEAD, nor record $GIT_DIR/MERGE_HEAD to cause the next git commit command to create a merge commit. This allows you to create a single commit on top of the current branch whose effect is the same as merging another branch (or more in case of an octopus).