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gitgit-revert

Reverting merge revert

I have reverted a merge commit (feature -> develop) this way:

git revert -m 1 <merge-commit-hash>
git push origin develop

A new commit has been created Revert "Merge branch 'feature'" Now I want to revert that revert. Should I just use the following command: git revert <revert-merge-branch-commit-hash> ?

Solution

  • Unfortunately, in most cases the answer is probably yes. (You should revert the revert commit.)

    I say "unfortunately" because in retrospect the two reverts together add unnecessary (and possibly confusing) commits to your history. Here are two possible alternatives to this:

    1. Reset the branch and force push it out. This results in a cleaner history, but for a shared remote branch such as develop, conditions have to be nearly perfect to even consider doing this outside of emergencies. (By nearly perfect I mean: no new commits on the branch, very little time has passed since the bad commits were added and/or it's unlikely others have branched off of it yet, etc.)
    2. You could re-create the branch that was originally merged in, and then rebase it onto itself from the starting commit using git rebase --no-ff [merge-base-commit]. This will force the rebase to rewrite the commits so they can be re-merged. I might choose this if new commits were added to that previous branch and now it is ready to be brought in again.

    But in general, most of the time, on a shared remote develop, it's probably going to be revert the revert.