How can I clean up a broken history with git-tfs

Question

I'm not sure how I managed to get into this state(*), but I've got some commits in my tfs/default remote branch that don't exist in TFS, so I want to get rid of them. So my history looks like this:

A--B--C--D tfs/default

... but commits B and C aren't actually changesets in TFS. As a result, when I checkout tfs/default I am out of sync with TFS because of commits B and C. Not good.

I figured I could fix it if I could somehow reset the tfs/default remote to A and do another "git tfs fetch" to end up with the actual history:

A--D tfs/default

but I'm not sure how to do that?

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*) If it makes any difference, I think it involved using "git tfs shelve" on B and C, maybe followed by some commits and a "git tfs pull". But I'm not sure.

Answer 1

Yes, you've got half of the answer! You should reset the tfs/default to a previous step and fetch. There is no way to do that in git (if I know well) because that's not a normal case but we could still do that by editing git files... it's easy!

If you are sure that you don't want to keep the B and C commits (otherwise save them temporary by creating a local branch), just do the following:

• Go into your .git folder and look for the file /refs/remotes/tfs/default
• edit the file and replace the sha in the file with the sha of commit A
• fetch from tfs

And that should be good!

edit: can also be done with command line git update-ref tfs/default SHAofcommitA