Start Git with an empty commit

Larry — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 23:45:17 +0000

Recently I've had reason to start several new projects with Git. That's nothing exciting (except for me), but it means I've been making a lot of first-commits, and often rebasing my early commit history before making it public. That, however, runs into an interesting problem: You can't easily rebase the first commit.

Sometimes that doesn't matter. Lately, though, I've repeatedly found myself wanting to change that first commit, often to remove a file that I included in the initial commit inadvertently.

Fortunately, Git offers a couple of ways around this situation. My personal favorite is to simply start the history with a null commit. Git normally won't let you make a commit if there's nothing to do, but you can easily disable that check. My new Git projects now tend to start like so:

Larry 16 January 2017 - 5:45pm

Drupal CVS dead at age 10

Larry — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:13:14 +0000

Drupal CVS dead at age 10

Drupal's CVS repository was pronounced dead this Thursday 24 February at 6:08 pm US Eastern Time. Cause of death was reported acute age combined with an inability to properly merge. CVS is survived by approximately 7000 Drupal projects and a new farm of Git repositories.

Larry 25 February 2011 - 2:13am

GIt

Start Git with an empty commit

Drupal CVS dead at age 10