git remove commit from a merge

Question

I have the following problem...

I was trying to merge a remote branch into my local, then push the changes to the repo... Ok, I fetched the remote branch which had three commits, but one of them is not finished, so I don't want push one of these commits to the repo... when I run git log, it shows me this:

commit: A1
merge: M1
    merge remote branch "remote/branch"


commit: A2 
commit: A3
commit: A4

And I want remove commit A2... how can I do it? I was searching and some people says to use git rebase or git reset, but I'm not sure which one should I use... just in case, I hadn't pushed these changes

Thanks for the help

Answer 1

If you haven't pushed your merge commit yet (that implies A2 was not pushed yet either) you can rebase interactively:

git rebase -i HEAD~3

Now delete the merge commit line. Then, reorder the commits so that A2 is the latest one done. Once that is complete, branch:

git branch incompleteFeature

Then reset master to the previous commit:

git reset --hard HEAD^

Now you can sync up properly and the incomplete feature will sit in it's own branch until you decide to merge it in later when it's ready.

hope this helps