Pull from remote branch, but do not include the whole history

Question

I'm using eZ Platform open source CMS. The way you start the project is to create it with composer. After some work, new version comes out and the only way to update it is to git pull from github repository, merge it and resolve conflicts.

The whole process is straight forward. Except there is a whole development tree from eZ Plaform available in my own git repo.

Is there a way to pull latest commit into the head of certain branch (dev) without pulling all the history since beginning?

Basically I'd like to have it like this:

A----B----C----D----E (merge from latest commit on remote branch)
                   /
                  F (basically not even having F in my git tree)

um the whole purpose of composer is so that you don't need to do that ... why can't you just run `php composer update` ? — cmorrissey, Sep 16 '16 at 20:31
Here is the instructions how to update https://doc.ez.no/display/DEVELOPER/Updating+eZ+Platform. Unfortunately you can't just change the version in composer. — Lord Zed, Sep 16 '16 at 20:46
Why can't you pull the whole history in a temp branch and then cherry-pick the latest commit(s) on your desired branch? ```Warning: This is subject to conflicts.``` — unrealsoul007, Sep 17 '16 at 00:23

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 09 '17 at 15:35

quite simple.

you can pull the new version tag in a newly created branch (let's say branch "v1.10" ) and solve all the conflicts there.

after solving the conflicts and having a new version and clean branch you can merge it back into your master with --squash option. that way you will not get any of those external trees or commits in your master branch.

git checkout master
git merge --squash v1.10
git commit

now you have new version in master without any extra commit.

Pull from remote branch, but do not include the whole history

1 Answers1