Re: Interactive rebase: using "pick" for merge commits

From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 12, 2024, 14:38 UTC
Message-ID: <040f142c-7ee2-429e-88eb-d328b01a4b8c@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <ZcnFl8kypKRYeLo3@tanuki>

Hi Patrick and Stefan

On 12/02/2024 07:15, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Sat, Feb 10, 2024 at 10:23:16AM +0100, Stefan Haller wrote:
>> On 09.02.24 17:24, Phillip Wood wrote:
>> Yes, I'm familiar with all this, but that's not what I mean. I don't
>> want to maintain the topology here, and I'm also not suggesting that git
>> itself generates such "pick" entries with -mX arguments (maybe I wasn't
>> clear on that). What I want to do is to add such entries myself, as a
>> user, resulting in the equivalent of doing a "break" at that point in
>> the rebase and doing a "git cherry-pick -mX <hash-of-merge-commit>"
>> manually.
> 
> It would be neat indeed if this could be specified in the instruction
> sheet. We already support options for the "merge" instruction, so
> extending "pick" to support options isn't that far-fetched. Then it
> would become possible to say "pick -m1 fa1afe1".

It would certainly be possible to extend the sequencer to do that but I'm not familiar with why people use "git cherry-pick -m" [1] so I'm wondering what this would be used for. It would involve a bit of extra complexity so I think we'd want a compelling reason as to why cherry-picking merges without maintaining the topology is useful especially as one can currently do that via "exec git cherry-pick -m ..."

Best Wishes

Phillip

[1] I did a quick web search and the results all seemed to focus on how to do it rather than why you'd want to.