Re: How to implement the "amend!" commit ?

From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 15, 2021, 10:42 UTC
Message-ID: <0236bb58-61a7-6126-b50f-93e8b6bf3aef@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <YACAHdDEMIgvQruK@nand.local>

Hi Taylor

On 14/01/2021 17:32, Taylor Blau wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 10:39:50AM +0000, Phillip Wood wrote:
>>> Secondly, As an alternative to above, we can use `--fixup=<commit>
>>> --amend` and `--fixup=<commit> --reword`.
>>
>> This is not backwards compatible. At the moment If you create a fixup with
>> `git commit --fixup=aaa` and then realize it should refer to commit bbb
>> instead you can fix it with `git commit --amend --fixup=bbb`. That would no
>> longer be possible.
> 
> Too bad. I felt that this was the most ergonomic idea put forwards, but
> I also thought that we died with '--amend --fixup=xxx'. Its current
> behavior does make sense to me, but it's too bad that we can't use it
> for this new purpose.

I guess we could decide to change the behavior but I'm not sure there is a sufficiently compelling reason to do that. I agree the current behavior makes sense but (based on no data at all) I'm not sure that it is used very much. One thing I like about this option is that it is much easier to create an alias to create a particular type of fixup, with --fixup=amend:<commit> you have to use a shell function alias to do that. The down side of re-purposing "--amend" is that it no longer always rewrites HEAD which is potentially confusing.

> I suppose the first option (the '--fixup=reword:xxx' one really is the
> only one that can be implemented while preserving backwards
> compatibility, so I think we have no choice but to go with that one.)

I agree, to me it feels a bit more cumbersome, but on the plus side I think it is arguably clearer than re-purposing '--fixup=<commit> --amend' and it is slightly less typing than specifying two options as well.

Thanks for your comments on this series

Best Wishes

Phillip

> Thanks,
> Taylor
>