Reverting a merge

Merge commits are a special case when it comes to revert. In order to be able to revert a merge commit, you'll have to specify which parent side of the merge you want to keep. However, when you revert a merge commit, you should keep in mind that though reverting will undo the changes to files, it doesn't undo history. This means that when you revert a merge commit, you declare that you will not have any of the changes introduced by the merge in the target branch. The effect of this is that the subsequent merges from the other branch will only bring in changes of commits that are not ancestors of the reverted merge commit.

In this example, we will learn how to revert a merge commit, and we'll learn how we can merge the branch again, getting all the changes merged by reverting the reverted merge commit.

Getting ready

Again, we'll use the hello world repository. Make a fresh clone of the repository, or reset the master branch if you have already cloned.

We can create a fresh clone...