Git Rebase Catchup

Helpful when you have a branch tracking an old commit, and a lot of conflicting changes have landed in the latest branch, but you still want to update.

A single rebase to the latest commit will require addressing all the different changes at once which can be difficult, overwhelming, and error-prone. Instead, if you rebased onto each intermediate conflicting point, you'd break up the work into smaller pieces, and be able to run tests to make sure things were still OK.

Requirements

You'll need at least:

• Git 2.22+
• Python 3.7+

Install

Copy git-rebase-catchup into your $PATH (e.g. ~/.bin/ or ~/.local/bin/), then run git rebase-catchup or git-rebase-catchup.

Example

Let's say you have a branch that is currently 357 commits behind. When you try rebasing onto the latest, it hits a lot of conflicts. The tool will bisect down to find the most recent commit it can cleanly rebase onto.

$ git rebase-catchup
Local branch resolved to "s-logs"
Tracking branch resolved to "origin/master"
Branch is 2 commits ahead and 357 commits behind
Trying to rebase onto latest origin/master ... failed; falling back to bisect
Rebasing onto origin/master~178 ... failed
Rebasing onto origin/master~267 ... failed
Rebasing onto origin/master~312 ... failed
Rebasing onto origin/master~334 ... failed
Rebasing onto origin/master~345 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~339 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~336 ... failed
Rebasing onto origin/master~337 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~336 ... failed
Found first failure origin/master~336

Now you know the first conflicting change is origin/master~336. Rebase onto that directly and address all the problems (and run tests/etc...). Then restart the process.

$ git rebase origin/master~336
... address all the conflicts ...
$ git rebase --continue
$ git rebase-catchup
Local branch resolved to "s-logs"
Tracking branch resolved to "origin/master"
Branch is 2 commits ahead and 335 commits behind
Trying to rebase onto latest origin/master ... failed; falling back to bisect
Rebasing onto origin/master~167 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~83 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~41 ... failed
Rebasing onto origin/master~62 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~51 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~46 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~43 ... failed
Rebasing onto origin/master~44 ... failed
Rebasing onto origin/master~45 ... OK
Rebasing onto origin/master~44 ... failed
Found first failure origin/master~44

Now you're only 44 commits behind. Keep doing this until you catchup!