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I've read some other questions (here, here, etc) , but didn't answer mine.

In the project I am working on there is a new rule: maximum 5 files changed/created per PR. I know how insane is this rule and sometime impossible to do it, because to make a functionality work sometimes more than 5 files need to be edited/created.

However for now that's the situation and I need to understand a simple way, (maybe there is a software for it) to achieve for example the following:

  1. From a branch with 8 files changed (compared to master)
  2. Split it into two new branches, one with 5 files and the other with 3 files (of my choice)

Now matter if the new branches will not have the functionality working. Still it is needed, no matter how insane is that - not my decision :(

How to split such branch?

Thank you

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    Tomorrow, new rule, the 3rd char of each file can't be a space. On tuesdays. Commented Aug 23, 2022 at 9:13
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    The only way is to do separate commits, one commit has 5 files, the other one 3. Doing such things afterwards is always bad, because you should not change the git history. Create two new branches, with two separate commits. And in the future, you have to commit your files splitted. Git will not do this for you, and also no software will do this, beacause it makes no sense. Commented Aug 23, 2022 at 9:24

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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You have my sympathy. Git handles everything at the commit level.

You can potentially take your feature branch, use git reset --soft to go back in the history and you can stage/unstage your changes to make multiple branches.

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You can rewrite entire histories by using rebase tool.

I'll show you an example of how you would do that. Assume your starting branch is feature/big.

Start by creating 2 branches, named feature/small1 and feature/small2 at the same point:

git branch feature/small1 feature/big git branch feature/small2 feature/big

Switch to one branch and remove some files/commit. You can use --fixup to remind yourself to squash the changes with a certain commit (or --amend if you want to change your last commit). Use git log <filename> to discover the commit id where the changes were made

git switch feature/small1 # remove file1 which was added on commit abcdef git rm file1 git commit --fixup abcdef # revert changes of file2 which was changed on commit 12345 git checkout file2 -- 12345^ git add file2 git commit --fixup 12345

Now squash the changes with the original commits where the changes were made, and push the new branch to the remote repository

git rebase -i --autosquash `git merge-base HEAD master` git push feature/small1

Repeat with feature/small2, but this time remove different files.

Refer to git rebase documentation for the explanation of what these commands do.

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Thank you. Can you please explain the second example? git checkout file2 -- 12345^ I usually use git checkout branchname to switch to a different branch. What is this revert? What will file2 contain? If the feature/small1 was created from feature/big the file file2 is identical to file2 in feature/big?!
if you provide a filename to git checkout it will get that file as it was at the commit specified, without switching branches or head. So this basically means "get the file named file2 how it was in the commit 12345^, (which is the parent of the 12345 commit)"

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