Idempotent git error with false conflicts?

Question

There are ~ 2000 commits in my git repository. For educational purposes, I played with git rebase -i .

When I type git rebase -i first-commit (where first-commit is the tag for the initial repo commit) and doesn't change anything (i.e. leave all pick <hash> untouched), git starts playing my story but doesn't execute About dozens of commits that reference conflicts. What can cause this? Why doesn't this just repeat my whole story?

Answer 1

I tried to recreate it using an open source project and got similar results, I reported conflicts when I reboot over the first commit using redirects.

I ran it a second time and noticed that this happens with the same commit.

 git clone git://git.lttng.org/lttng-tools.git git tag first-commit fac6795 git rebase -i first-commit Could not apply e4baff1... listing and activation of loglevel by number git rebase --abort 

The conflict seems to be close to the merger point:

 * 843f5df (HEAD, tag: new-tag) API change for lttng_destroy_session prototype * 90192ee Merge branch 'master' |\ | * 4dbd54a update loglevel printout | * e4baff1 listing and activation of loglevel by number * | 76d45b4 Add support for UST enable all tracepoints * | 6181537 Cleanup lttng enable event command |/ * 13dce3b loglevels: allow enable/disable * 81afa34 Add loglevel to event list * 57ab763 ABIs now support 256 char event names 

run rebase again with the -p option, though:

 -p, --preserve-merges Instead of ignoring merges, try to recreate them. This uses the --interactive machinery internally, but combining it with the --interactive option explicitly is generally not a good idea unless you know what you are doing (see BUGS below). 

git rebase will change the history to a more linear one. Since there are mergers in history, they should be resolved if there are conflicts when the merge point is smoothed.