Re: [PATCH] Show an example of deleting commits with git-rebase.

From: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@mellanox.co.il>
Date: Feb 7, 2007, 10:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20070207101624.GC20290@mellanox.co.il>
In-Reply-To: <20070205202106.GA8755@spearce.org>

Show 47 quoted lines

> Quoting Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>:
> Subject: [PATCH] Show an example of deleting commits with git-rebase.
> 
> This particular use of git-rebase to remove a single commit or a
> range of commits from the history of a branch recently came up on
> the mailing list.  Documenting the example should help other users
> arrive at the same solution on their own.
> 
> It also was not obvious to the newcomer that git-rebase is able to
> accept any commit for --onto <newbase> and <upstream>.  We should
> at least minimally document this, as much of the language in
> git-rebase's manpage refers to 'branch' rather than 'committish'.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
> ---
>  Documentation/git-rebase.txt |   27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++--
>  1 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
> index 0cb9e1f..977f661 100644
> --- a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
> @@ -114,6 +114,27 @@ would result in:
>  
>  This is useful when topicB does not depend on topicA.
>  
> +A range of commits could also be removed with rebase.  If we have
> +the following situation:
> +
> +------------
> +    E---F---G---H---I---J  topicA
> +------------
> +
> +then the command
> +
> +    git-rebase --onto topicA~5 topicA~2 topicA
> +
> +would result in the removal of commits F and G:
> +
> +------------
> +    E---H'---I'---J'  topicA
> +------------
> +
> +This is useful if F and G were flawed in some way, or should not be
> +part of topicA.  Note that the argument to --onto and the <upstream>
> +parameter can be any valid commit-ish.
> +

Good clarification, a couple of comments:
- The use of <branch> is more confusing than useful in this case.
  You can always just do
	git reset --hard topicA
	git-rebase --onto topicA~5 topicA~2
  instead, correct?

- The use of ~ notation here is also more scary than clarifying.
   git-rebase --onto F H
  will be clearer I think.

-- 
MST