git rebase after previous git merge
git merge --squash is now my preferred way of rebasing after a large amount of work and many merges (see this answer). If the branch you're working on is called my-branch and you want to rebase from master then just do the following:
git checkout my-branch
git branch -m my-branch-old
git checkout master
git checkout -b my-branch
git merge --squash my-branch-old
git commit
Rebasing to get a "clean" history is overrated. The best way if you want to preserve history is just to do the merge instead of a rebase. That way if you ever need to go back to a revision, it is exactly the same as the one you tested during development. That also solves your issue about the previously solved merge conflicts.
If you don't care about preserving history, you can create a new branch off of master, check it out, then do a git read-tree -u -m dev to update your working tree to match the dev branch. Then you can commit everything into one big commit and merge it into master as normal.
Two remarks:
- you can rebase your own (non yet pushed) work as many time as you want on top of newly fetched commits.
- You could avoid the merge conflicts (during rebase) if you had activated
git rerere, which is done for this kind of situation.
See more at git rerere.
You can take all of the changes in your branch and put them into a new commit in master with the following:
git diff master > my_branch.patch
git checkout master
patch -p1 < my_branch.patch
Then stage your files and commit.
Regarding the replay of merge conflicts, you can use git rerere to maintain a database of how merge conflicts have already been solved, so that performing a rebase that results in the same conflicts will have the laborious parts done for you automatically.
https://hackernoon.com/fix-conflicts-only-once-with-git-rerere-7d116b2cec67
git config --global rerere.enabled true
The one thing to look out for is that if you resolved something incorrectly it will be automatically borked for you next time too, and you may not really realize it.
More formal documentation here: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rerere