Re: Question about git revert

[Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Hal Eisen <eisen@dunhackin.org> wrote:
> I did a search of the archives for this mailing list, and couldn't
> find anything applicable.
>
> I am having the same problem as Joshua Cheek.  He asked this question
> on StackOverflow about a month ago.
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2938301/git-remove-specific-commit
>
> There are no merges involved.  I would be perfectly happy having
> another commit in my history which documents the reverting of a prior
> commit.
>
> The problem seems to stem from git-revert not properly calculating the
> "cleanness" of the prior commit, and incorrectly thinking that later
> commits depend on the to-be-reverted commit.

Reverts will only be clean if you're undoing changes on lines that
haven't been touched in subsequent commits AND the 3 lines on both
sides of such changes have not been modified either.  (The 3 lines of
context means that in your example, later commits _do_ depend on the
to-be-reverted commit).  In your example, you're dealing with a file
with only three lines, one line added per commit.  Thus, in that
example, you can't revert any of the commits cleanly except the last.

> I have seen other web sites which suggest using git to manually
> generate a diff, and then applying it as a reverse patch, but that
> seems like a kludge.

This solution would have the exact same problem (unless you created a
patch with 0 lines of context).

> What is the best solution for this use case?

Manually fix the conflict.  Or see Christian's email about using
special strategies, if you can find or write one for this special case
that doesn't depend on context lines (a strategy that is usually not
desirable for source code).


Hope that helps,
Elijah