Re: [PATCH] Re: rebase -i: auto-squash commits

From: John Koleszar <john.koleszar@on2.com>
Date: Jun 18, 2009, 14:04 UTC
Message-ID: <1245333895.30640.28.camel@cp-jk-linux.corp.on2.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0906181028140.4848@intel-tinevez-2-302>

On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 04:29 -0400, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 24 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 18 Jun 2009, Teemu Likonen wrote:
> 
> > On 2009-06-18 10:06 (+0200), Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > 
> > > I'd really rather stay with "fixup". And as I use single-letter
> > > commands quite often, I'd also rather stay away from that magic "!".
> > > And by "magic" I really mean that: people will not find that magic
> > > intuitive at all.
> > 
> > I don't know about people but I do find "!" intuitive. It is squash
> > after all so I like the idea of using small modifier character.
> 
> Mhm.
> 
> So let's just interpret the "!" in the most common meaning, namely to add 
> an imperative.  Then it means "yes, I do want to squash".  Not 
> "squash, but oh, BTW, I want to lose the second commit message 
> completely, and I do not want to edit the commit message either".
> 
> Really, I do not see how anybody could find this intuitive at all.  Maybe 
> after reading the manual, but kinda defeats the meaning of the word 
> "intuitive".

The imperative is actually the reason I picked that modifier, as in "yes, I /really/ do want to squash. Don't ask me, just do it!" Something akin to -f. I think it makes sense here, but not in the case someone else mentioned of a commit message only edit. ("recommit" for that case?)

In any case, I think this non-interactive squash is orthagonal to being able to automatically rearrange the commits by "squash to ...". I think that's a cool idea, but I know that I often don't remember the text of the commit I want to squash into. So in my case I prefer rearranging manually and squashing non-interactively. If I planned ahead, I could pick a prefix for each "class" of commit, and then "squash to prefix", but I'd want to be able to edit the original commit to remove the prefix. Sure, I could look at the log, but if I'm just writing a nonsense message to remind myself where to squash to, I think it would get in the way of my flow.