trial and stderrI was working on a large refactor with hundreds of changed files, with six commits on the branch past main. But somehow something had broken that seemed totally unrelated to my work! When I would git checkout main everything was fine, and when I would git checkout mybranch it had broken. Specifically, some Typescript types for a third-party library were no longer resolving—and my changes involved neither the third party library nor the Typescript setup.
First thing I did was see if I had changed any of the build config files, anything at the top level that could make strange things happen. git checkout main yarn.lock and things like that. No dice.
How I ended up resolving the issue was the following:
- Create a new branch,
git checkout -b mybranch-debug - Do an interactive rebase with
git rebase -iandfixupeverything into a single commit - Split that commit into one commit per file using this script, resulting in hundreds of commits.
git bisectto find the guilty file- Delete stuff from that file until it's evident what caused the problem
Hope that helps someone else figure their way out of a baffling problem!