How to eliminate junk commits in a Git repository?

Question

When I am investigating on a bug, I am sometime not working carefully especially when I am digging down on several branches with many commits.

Hopefully once I am done with it, I merge the working result to my master branch with a git merge yeah_i_got_it. Here is what my repository might look like in such situations:

    v There is a bug here
A---B---C----------------------------------------------F (master)
     \                                                /
      o---o---o--o--o (bug)                          /
               \                                    / 
                o---o--o--o (oups_this_way_better) /
                     \        v Clean a bit       /
                      o---D---E------------------o (yeah_i_got_it)    
                          ^        
                          Solved the bug here

Eventually I expect to keep only some relevant commits at the end of the day:

A--B--C--D--F (master)

Regarding the rest, is it just garbage and I don't need it. So, what is the best way to deal with this unpleasant workflow?

Because Git keeps everything even after all garbage branches were removed, a useful option to Git would be to give an importance flag with each commit in order to help me cleaning my repository after the rush. In my repositores I can identify useless commits, commits that may be useful one day, commits that will definitely be usefull and, last but not least, the very important commits that I need to keep along with their branches.

Getting rid of the useless commits usually takes me a lot of time. I will need to review my log back, identify the ones I want to eliminate and do the job with no mistake.

So my question is:

How to properly eliminate temporary commits and branches from my Git repositories definitively?

Here some random thoughts:

• My workflow is just bad, I should never work like that.
• Just add a prefix to each temporary commits comments like "junk" or "garbage".
• A native Git solution may exist that can help me to do the job like git rebase-and-clean yeah_i_got_it --keep D

Answer 1

The way to do what you're asking is to checkout master at C, then do a git merge --squash yeah_i_got_it. This will collapse the whole branch into one commit.

Another way would be to rebase-interactive the commits, with a git rebase -i master from your yeah_i_got_it branch. In the interactive rebase you could mark E as a "fixup". If its commit message began with "fixup!" and you had the appropriate git config options set, then the marking would be done automatically.

Note: you say you want A-B-C-D-F, but I think you actually just want A-B-C-D. There's no need for the "F" commit.