Pushing into origin/master with a new change description

[Andreas Pakulat]

Hi,

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Morten Volden <mvolden2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not quite sure if I broke something in the remote repo or not (I sincerely
> hope not), so just to make sure.

It does not look like anything was broken, although the gitk history
could look a tad bit nicer.

> I took the changes made in my local development branch (for both
> kdevplatform and kdevelop ) and merged them into my local master.

It seems you first merged master into your local branch regularly and
also directly before pushing which is why the merge of
outputview-extension into master was a 'fast-forward' . Thats why
there was no dedicated merge-commit saying 'outputview-extension was
merged into master' anymore. As Ivan already said, you could prevent
this with git merge --no-ff.

> Browsing the remote repository I see that there is no revision number to
> these changes and there is no change description.

If you talk about the git merge outputview-extension done in your
local master branch, then yes since there was no commit created for
this.

> What I really wanted was to have a single change description for all the
> small commits that was made in the development branch. I naively expected
> git to present me with the option to do this at some point in the process.

See the git merge manual, if it can do a fast-forward then it'll
prefer that by default. A separate merge-commit is only inserted when
using --no-ff or if the a fast-forward is not possible.

> So the question is:
>
> a) Is the remote repository broken?

No.

> b) Is there some way to fix the change description in the remote repo?

No. You need to make sure the history is as you want it before
pushing. Personally I find gitk very useful for this.

Andreas

PS: There are technical ways of changing the history, but you cannot
do this yourself (requires sysadmins giving you force-push rights
temporarily) nor is it really necessary in this case.