git commit gives error: empty commit set passed

Question

When trying to revert to a previous commit, I tried:

git revert --no-commit 0766c053..HEAD

However this gave an error:

empty commit set passed

Question: What does the error mean, and what went wrong with the revert command?

Answer 1

It seems to me that you misused the double dot annotation to specify a commit range.

So your range doesn't return any commits which means that revert can't do anything, since you effictively said "revert no commits".

The gitpro book explains the double dot annotation (link to chapter) pretty solid:

The most common range specification is the double-dot syntax. This basically asks Git to resolve a range of commits that are reachable from one commit but aren’t reachable from another. For example, say you have a commit history that looks like Figure 6-1.

You want to see what is in your experiment branch that hasn’t yet been merged into your master branch. You can ask Git to show you a log of just those commits with master..experiment — that means "all commits reachable by experiment that aren’t reachable by master." For the sake of brevity and clarity in these examples, I’ll use the letters of the commit objects from the diagram in place of the actual log output in the order that they would display:

$ git log master..experiment
D
C

If, on the other hand, you want to see the opposite — all commits in master that aren’t in experiment — you can reverse the branch names. experiment..master shows you everything in master not reachable from experiment:

$ git log experiment..master
F
E

Answer 2

Remove the ..HEAD part. At least on my system (git v2.7.4) this resolved the issue.

git revert --no-commit 0766c053