Git overwriting file changes when doing a merge

Question

I have a git repository where a teammate forked the branch and made commits and then remerged then reverted and some other steps I am unclear on... Those changes and then made commits on top of the merge. This caused my changes to be overwritten, such that the merge itself is pulling in other branch changes from COMMIT 3 and if I try to do a hard reset and remerge it always rewrites. I've tried applying patches but because of the changes in COMMIT 3 I cannot just apply a patch of commit 1, and I do not wish to creat a .gitattributes in 5 different directories and specify a merge strategy as suggested here: Is it possible to exclude specific commits when doing a git merge? .

Is there a simpler way to merge and keep my changes?

This diagram should show the commit structure:

HEAD
  |
COMMIT 1
  |
COMMIT 2  <-- MERGE branch mainline
  |     \
  |     BRANCH-COMMIT 1  
  |           |
  |     BRANCH-COMMIT 2
  |           |
COMMIT 3      |
  |    \      |
  |  COMMIT   |
  *    |      *
       *

You could rebase your branch onto his, or vice versa – scrowler Jul 14 '15 at 01:08 — scrowler, Jul 14 '15 at 01:08

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 14 '15 at 21:23

In this case rebasing did not work. The issue here was the fork was due to a reset and remerge which for some reason caused some of the commits to be overwritten. However originally all the BRANCH-COMMIT-* were merged to mainline.

To fix this I created a patch with all the commits that were overwritten and reapplied the patch:

git format-patch BRANCH-COMMIT-2^..BRANCH-COMMIT-1 --stdout > feature.patch
git am --signoff < ~/feature.patch

Git overwriting file changes when doing a merge

1 Answers1