Creating independent branches with GitEdit

The short version

git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/newbranch
rm .git/index
# and now git add, git commit etc

Alternative

 git checkout --orphan new-branch-name
 git rm -rf . # or rm .git/index, as above
 git commit --allow-empty -m 'Create new-branch-name branch'

The long version

Normally you create a branch by "forking" off from some other point in the development history (often the HEAD of an existing branch). Ultimately you can trace the ancestry of all your branches back to a "great-grand-daddy" commit, shown as an X in the diagram below:

  o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o
 /
X--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o
    \                         /
     o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o
            \
             o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o

It’s a common workflow and forking off such a new branch is extremely easy to do:

git checkout -b my_new_branch

So what do you do if you want your repository to contain a completely unrelated branch that does not begin from that common "great-grand-daddy" commit? In other words, a new line of development that starts from point Y?

  o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o
 /
X--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o
    \                         /
     o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o
            \
             o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o

Y--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o
                                  \
                                   o--o--o

I recently wanted to do this with my Synergy repository. The reason was that when I moved to Git I had done a shallow import of the old Subversion repository. Basically I had a few branches in the old repo, of which the following two are pertinent for the purposes of this discussion:

o--o--o--o--Z "trunk" (Leopard)
    \
     o--W "jaguar"

My shallow import was basically just a new repository that started from the old tip of the trunk, Z in the above diagram. The new repository didn’t have any history or any other branches. Development continued in the new Git repository and now looked like this:

Z--o--o--o--o--o "master" (Leopard)

But when it came time to make some changes to the old "jaguar" branch I didn’t want to go back to using my old Subversion repository, I wanted to instead get that branch into my Git repo. But given that the new Git repo didn’t actually contain the common ancestry point at which the "trunk" and "jaguar" branches diverged, I would need to add a new branch corresponding to point W from the old repo. (Going back and importing the common ancestry point wasn’t an option because — although possible — that would involve rewriting the history of all the commits in the new repository, changing their SHA1 ids, and I didn’t want to do that.)

I would then end up with two independent branches like this:

Z--o--o--o--o--o "master" (Leopard)

W--o--o "jaguar"

In order to do this you need to make direct use of the low-level "plumbing":

# make sure there are no uncommitted changes
git status

# blow away everything in the working tree
rm -r *

# see if there are any dot files which should also be blown away
ls -laF

# in my case, there were; I want to remove everything except the .git dir
rm .gitignore

# grab source corresponding to point "W"
svn export the_svn_url/tags/3.2-release

# move it into place
mv 3.2-release/* .
rmdir 3.2-release

# prepare the index to exactly mirror the contents of the working tree
git add -u
git add .

# create a new tree object corresponding to the state of the index
# this produced a tree object with hash 0112c3d643ebbe7c8834e850e6b13d7c13018b04
git write-tree

# put together a commit message
cat > /tmp/cmsg <<HERE
Import 3.2 release

This corresponds to the 3.2 (Jaguar) release tag from the old
Subversion repository.

Signed-off-by: Greg Hurrell <greg@hurrell.net>
HERE

# now create a commit from the tree object previously created
# this produced a new commit object with hash 7b24419a52514084992fe62a3dc848b2f18c97f8
git commit-tree 0112c3d643ebbe7c8834e850e6b13d7c13018b04 < /tmp/cmsg

# create a new branch from the commit just created
git branch jaguar 7b24419a52514084992fe62a3dc848b2f18c97f8

# put the index and working tree back the way they were before
git reset HEAD
git clean -f -d

# inspect
gitk --all

# finally, double-check that the new branch matches the one in the old repo
# to do this I diffed against a separate svn export of the old repo that I had at /tmp/jaguar
git checkout jaguar
diff -r . /tmp/jaguar

See also

See also this weblog post which goes into some detail describing another method which is shorter but requires some direct manipulation and knowledge of Git internals; but basically boils down to:

git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/newbranch
rm .git/index
# and now git add, git commit etc