Move modifications made in develop branch into a new git-flow feature branch?

Question

I'm using git-flow for my projects, and have started a rather complicated set of changes in the develop branch, which appear to take longer than I expected first.

I wish I had done this in a feature branch, since I'd like to make a new release with other changes. How can I move these uncommitted changes into a new git-flow feature branch?

Answer 1

If you've made no commits

If you simply have a dirty working copy, just act like you are about to start a new feature:

git flow feature start awesomeness
git commit -va

If you did make some commits

If there are commits in develop that should have been in your feature branch, the above steps are the same. In addition though you'll (possibly - this isn't required) want to reset your develop branch back to where it was before you started committing the changes for your feature branch, which you can do with:

git flow feature start awesomeness
git commit -va
git checkout develop
git reset origin/develop --hard

Answer 2

Here's one way to do it:

git checkout where-you-should-have-made-your-feature-branch
git branch feature-branch
git checkout feature-branch
foreach commit in commits-that-should-have-been-on-your-feature-branch:
    # do this for each commit in chronological order
    git cherry-pick commit

Now it depends on whether you've already pushed your develop branch to a public repository or not. If everything is still private, and you want to rewrite history:

git checkout develop-branch
foreach commit in commits-that-should-have-been-on-your-feature-branch:
    # do this for each commit in reverse chronological order
    git rebase --onto commit~1 commit develop-branch

If you don't want to rewrite history:

git checkout develop-branch
foreach commit in commits-that-should-have-been-on-your-feature-branch:
    # do this for each commit in reverse chronological order
    git revert commit

And that should do it.