How do I merge a bulk number of commits at a time in GIT?

Question

How do I merge a large number of commits in phases of, say, 20 commits at a time?

Answer 1

git merge accepts any commit specification, so you can do:

git merge ...
git merge origin/master~60
git merge origin/master~40
git merge origin/master~20
git merge origin/master

or even git merge 357a887 to merge everything up to commit 357a887...

Answer 2

Why would you want to do that? Mashing up the commits just gets rid of the history.

If you really do want to do this, I'd go for "git rebase -i" (interactive rebase), that alows you to go wild rewriting history (reordering commits, smashing them together, delete some, ...). Splitting commits can be done, but it is a bit tricky.

I'd go like:

git branch save # don't want to lose the original accidentally...

git rebase -i HEAD~20 # for last 20 commits

# Edit the offered template at will, minimal help included

# Exiting the editor makes git do as told, it might stop if manual intervention required