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Comment by hobo_mark | Hacker News Reader

I see often, including in this case, that GitHub contains only a squashed version of the development history. Assuming that the developer keeps working on top of the original branch with full history, is there a way to keep a squashed and a not-squashed branch in sync automatically?

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When you say “squashed” vs “not-squashed”, are you referring to the “squash” merge feature in Github?

If so, that turns a PR branch into a single commit onto the target branch (master). Unless the old branches are kept around, the unsquashed commits won’t be available.

I'm referring to the squash feature of git rebase. The developer collapsed years of commits into one before pushing to GitHub, I am wondering if there is a way to keep working on top of the original history privately, and pushing to the "clean" history on GitHub, without having to cherry-pick all new commits for GitHub by hand.

I guess the "easiest" solution would be a clean and separate "github" directory where no work happens and where you just cp all your changes from your actual working directory into.

If they version it, I could also imagine using master as an orphan branch and just cherry-pick the changes between two tags or commits into it.

git replace¹ should be able to do it; otherwise, grafts² work too.

¹ https://git-scm.com/docs/git-replace ² https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GraftPoint

That is it! Fantastic, thanks!

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Replace gives the exact example of what I had in mind.

In this particular case it seems justified as the framework was part of a bigger project. So probably the majority of the commit history would not be relevant to the project in its current state.

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