Git: How to merge a small, but very old branch?

Creating a new branch "X" from the point where B and master diverged and then merging B into X won't help you. That would simply be a fast-forward merge; there would be literally no change to the conflicts caused by merge B into master. Your only option is to perform the merge of B into master and address the conflicts.

Conflicts are what they are, and there is no way "around" them.

Yeah in the end I think you're right, and this is the approach I took. Good tools would help a lot. Strangely, the conflict resolution tool in Eclipse (well, PyDev anyway) was less good than the generic Mac "opendiff".

It's pretty damn hard to manage that many conflicts though, and to make sure nothing gets lost. Good test cases would help, too, I guess. – Steve Bennett yesterday @SteveBennett: Tests are indeed great, but only go so far, since if you're merging a really old commit, any tests it added may not be complete anymore, and any tests it changed might be changed in the wrong way.

– Jefromi 17 hours ago.

If it's bad enough, you might want to just manually rewrite the patch against HEAD or at least a more recent version. This will not only help deal with the conflicts, and leave you a history you'll probably like better, but also help you avoid bugs that aren't part of merge conflicts. There's quite a lot of potential for problems due to code changing underneath the change, and not all of it would actually present as a merge conflict.

That said, if you do want to try to do it solely in merge-y ways, you're going to have to deal with these conflicts one way or another. It's possible that you could spare yourself some pain by doing it incrementally, stepping forward in time in smaller increments. I might do this by progressively rebasing the branch forward: git rebase version-2 old-branch # deal with conflicts if they happen git rebase version-3 old-branch # and so on... # until old-branch is based on a recent version git checkout master git merge old-branch This would effectively let you deal with smaller changes in each step, instead of dealing with it all at once.

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