Hi, On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 6:53 PM, Pierre-Luc Loyer <Pierre-Luc.Loyer@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > I've encountered a situation using rebase for which I don't understand the results, even after reading the documentation. > I'm currently working in my feature branch and then I want to squash commits, thus I use interactive rebase. After successfully completing the rebase, I end up in a detached HEAD state, rather than back on my branch, which is confusing. The command that is causing me to be in detached HEAD mode is: git rebase -i HEAD~2 HEAD > From the documentation, I read that my second parameter (HEAD) is the <branch> parameter: > > git rebase [-i | --interactive] [options] [--exec <cmd>] [--onto <newbase>] > > [<upstream>] [<branch>] > > If <branch> is specified, git rebase will perform an automatic git checkout <branch> before doing anything else. Otherwise it remains on the current branch. > <branch> Working branch; defaults to HEAD. > > Upon completion, <branch> will be the current branch. > > Here is a full example than can be used to easily repro the issue. Go to an empty folder. > git init > git echo text > file.txt > git add . > git commit -m "Add file.txt" > git echo text2 > file.txt > git commit -am "Modify file.txt" > git echo text3 > file.txt > git commit -am "Remodify file.txt" > > Now the interesting part: > $ git rebase -i HEAD~2 HEAD > [detached HEAD 9178b93] Modify file > 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) > Successfully rebased and updated detached HEAD. > > From the documentation it says that <branch> (which is HEAD) will be checked out before doing anything and that upon completion, <branch> will be the current branch. However, this doesn't seem to happen. In fact, it seems more like the following is happening during the rebase: > 1) detach HEAD > 2) rebase > 3) reattach to <branch> > > If <branch> is HEAD, then is does nothing and remains detached. > I find this behavior confusing since I would expect it to return to whatever HEAD was pointing to at the start of the command, such as my branch. Also, the documentation says that the <branch> parameter defaults to HEAD, so passing 'HEAD' explicitly should result in the same behavior as not passing it: > <branch> Working branch; defaults to HEAD. You are right, it is probably a bug. I guess usually people just use "git rebase -i HEAD~2" or "git rebase -i master" and don't give the [<branch>] argument when using -i. If you are interested in helping us debug this you might first want to check if older git versions behaved like this. Thanks, Christian. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html