Squash commits directly on feature without rebase or merge

In my team's workflow we often merge with upstream in the middle of a bunch of commits, and rebasing could get ugly. I've found this helpful to squash all commits that are ahead of master down into one:

# Commit any working changes on branch "mybranchname", then...git checkout mastergit checkout -b mybranchname_tempgit merge --squash mybranchnamegit commit -am "Message describing all squashed commits"git branch -m mybranchname mybranchname_unsquashedgit branch -m mybranchname# Optional cleanup:git branch -D mybranchname_unsquashed# If squashing already-pushed commits...git push -f

Solution: It is possible to squash multiple commits into single one without rebasing. The best option is to create a new temporary branch from master, then merge the messy branch squashed in only single commit into the temporary branch, then making a pointer to it in your working branch and after delete the temporary one.

Lets assume:

• master is your master branch,
• feature is your messy working branch
• temp is your temporary branch

How to do it?

git checkout -b <temp> <master>git merge --squash <feature>git commit -m "your single message"git checkout <feature>git reset --hard <temp>git push -fgit branch -D <temp>

Before:

(Feature)          A --> B --> C --> D --> E --> F --> G                  /(Master)  M1 --> M2 --> M3

After:

                           AG -->                           /(Master)  M1 --> M2 --> M3 

Yes and no.

Yes, you can avoid changing the parent of commit 'A' but I believe you can't avoid git rebase. You can do interactive rebase on the same root:

git rebase -i M2 Feature

Then you can do whatever you want and at the end branch Feature will still start from commit M2.