Sublime Forum

**pbb** · March 29, 2019, 12:27pm

I am not sure if this is a bug, or if it is by design and it’s just my limited knowledge of Git that gets me confused…

Say I have a branch with multiple commits, and another branch that splits off halfway:

A - B - C - D - E - F
              \ G - H

Now if I edit commit “C” (Context menu > Edit Commit > Edit Commit Contents), then I end up with the following tree:

A - B - C' - D' - E' - F'
      \ C - D - G - H

(Where C’, D’, etc contain the edit I did.)

Is this by design, or is there a bug?

**michaelblyons** · March 29, 2019, 6:39pm

This is a Git thing, not specific to Sublime Merge. You can, if you wish, subsequently rebase G onto D' to give you a G' - H' branch off of D'. The reason this doesn’t happen automatically is that if anyone else is using G or H, you are cutting their knees out from under them.

Here’s the CLI instructions for doing what I described. (Sorry I don’t know how to do it in SM)

github.com

git/git/blob/master/Documentation/git-rebase.txt#L100-L158


Here is how you would transplant a topic branch based on one
branch to another, to pretend that you forked the topic branch
from the latter branch, using `rebase --onto`.


First let's assume your 'topic' is based on branch 'next'.
For example, a feature developed in 'topic' depends on some
functionality which is found in 'next'.


------------
    o---o---o---o---o  master
         \
          o---o---o---o---o  next
                           \
                            o---o---o  topic
------------


We want to make 'topic' forked from branch 'master'; for example,
because the functionality on which 'topic' depends was merged into the
more stable 'master' branch. We want our tree to look like this:

This file has been truncated. show original

**pbb** · April 1, 2019, 12:04pm

Thanks, that makes sense!

I haven’t figured out how to do a rebase on any random commit in Sublime Merge yet (as per your "rebase G onto D'"), I’ve only been able to rebase onto the top of a branch (which would be F' in my example).

**michaelblyons** · April 1, 2019, 2:51pm

To do arbitrary sequences of commits, you need the 3-term rebase --onto. From this tree:

A - B - C' - D' - E' - F'
      \ C - D - G - H

into this tree:

A - B - C' - D' - E' - F'
                \ G' - H'

You’re going to do

git rebase --onto "D'" D H

Or, if it is helpful:

git rebase --onto desired-branch-point first-commit^ last-commit

Note the ^! It is critical. Also, if you use a branch reference for the last-commit, it will move the branch with the rebase. If you use the SHA hash, the branch will stay pointing at its old place.

Editing commit duplicates all following commits in all future branches