Search code examples
githubgit-forkgit-rewrite-history

What happens to a forked repo when its origin's history is rewritten?

Having Repo1 with branch master having 13 commits, another Repo2 is forked from it.

What happens when someone uses git rebase and force push to origin on Repo1?

Will the forked Repo2 get affected?

Solution

  • Repo2 won't be affected, and won't know about Repo1 history reorganization.

    But a local clone of the fork (Repo2) might decide to synchronize its content with the "upstream" repo, meaning the original repo Repo1.
    Doing so is usually done by adding a remote named "upstream" with the URL of Repo1, doing a fetch, and rebasing one's own local branch on top of upstream/master.
    That is generally needed before pushing a feature branch to do a pull request back to the original repo.

    That rebase is often easy to do... except when the history has changed completely.