Got into a tricky situation lately where I was working on feature in Gecko on an old branch. Behind the scenes, a few thousand files in Gecko had been changed due to giant reactor of string literals.
This caused git to get all sorts of confused, meaning it became impossible to a do a rebase.
git rebase branches/default/tip Performing inexact rename detection: 0% (n/6385864772), done. ... merge conflicts...
Talking to my colleague Dan Glastonbury, he suggested that I instead tell the “broken branch” to track a particular good branch. That allowed the rebase to work.
moz-phab patch D12345 (some patch for Phabricator...) git branch -u origin/bookmarks/central git rebase
That solved it.