Git “missing” commit

Question

I\'m in a situation where some changes made in a feature branch are not reflected in master, even though this branch was merged into it. I\'m at a loss to understand why. For

Answer 1

You are a victim of an evil merge.

Here is how to reproduce it

git init testrepo
cd testrepo

touch initial
git add initial
git commit -m 'initial commit'

git checkout -b feature_branch
echo "A" >> file
git add file
git commit -m 'file committed'

git checkout master

Now do an interactive merge as if there were merge conflicts

git merge --no-commit --no-ff feature_branch

and move the file file (evil merge).

testrepo (master|MERGING)

git mv file someOtherFile
git commit

Now you will see that branch master contains the commit (in my case 9469682) that introduced file file

 git branch --contains 9469682
  feature_branch
 * master

But a git log will not show it, because it was moved

 git log -- file
 (no output)

Use

git log --follow -- file

and the commit appears again.

Also keep in mind that the merge can get more evil. If the file's content also changed a lot than èven git log --follow will not detect it, because of the rename threshold.

In this case use git log --follow --find-renames= to adjust the rename threshold.

If generating diffs, detect and report renames for each commit. For following files across renames while traversing history, see --follow. If n is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file’s size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn’t changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.

Answer 2

If somehow the location of the file has changed, you might need to tell git log to follow:

$ git checkout master
$ git log --follow -- file | grep A

You can check if there is a difference between git log --oneline -- file and git log --oneline --follow -- file, to see if the file has been relocated.