Remove references from amended commits after rewriting history

[vermiculus]

Creating this issue after contacting GitHub support:

My question is very similar to https://stackoverflow.com/q/21983964/1443496. If you take a look at cask/cask#399, I've unwittingly dirtied that issue with a bunch of references to commits that, at least conceptually, should no longer exist. These references were made using functionality described here, but when it was proved the change (say, commit A.1) didn't actually fix the issue, I amended the commit and re-pushed (--force-with-lease) commit A.2. The new commit (A.2) does appear on the issue, but A.1 also still appears.

Is there any way I can remove A.1?

I often find myself in this situation -- is there anything I can do going forward to cleanup this issue when it happens again? This isn't uncommon on my development branches (which I need to push for CI's sake).

Hi Sean,
It's not possible to remove issue references from the issue timeline. I'll definitely pass that along to the team as a feature request though!In the meantime, you could stick to only referencing issues in PRs that you push your commits to instead of referencing the issue in the commit message itself. Does that workaround work for you?
Best,
Shawna

I can understand the desire to leave the commit around in GitHub's history for reference when the commits are significantly different, but there are clearly cases where this isn't the desired behavior. My suggestion would be some sort of UI on the reference itself to disassociate that commit with the issue.

For example, if commits A.n reference octocat#12, it should be possible to visit octocat#12 and disassociate each commit A.n_k from the issue. I admit this would be tedious for instances where many commits were created, but I can't think of a better way to do it that's guaranteed to not overdo it (and it's my own fault for making a mess).

[vermiculus]

My reply (for reference):

Good to know it's not possible at present, at least! Your workaround (as-is) won't work for my case since I don't use GitHub's PR workflow all that much, but my current workaround (which is essentially the same thing) of not mentioning the issue/entity until the commit has 'stabilized' is working for now – if not dangerously easy to forget.

[bdrazen]

Any developments on this? Pretty annoying. 😕

[rafasc]

Now that #253 has been addressed, maybe this one will get some traction.

The motivation for this one should be pretty much the same what @nat mentioned when announcing the feature that allowed closing #253 (comment).

[Broxzier]

Almost 4 years have passed since this issue was created, and I still bump into issues being references by rebased commits, clusting the issues up completely and no way to remove these mentions. Just being able to manually remove these references from the issue timeline would be perfect.