Re: Git Evolve

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: Oct 2, 2018, 01:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20181002012326.GA96979@syl>
In-Reply-To: <CAPL8ZivFmHqS2y+WmNR6faRMnuahiqwPVYsV99NiJ1QLHOs9fQ@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Stefan,

On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 04:00:04PM -0700, Stefan Xenos wrote:

> Hello, List!
>
> I'm interested in porting something like Mercurial's evolve command to
> Git.

Welcome to Git :-). I think that the discussion in this thread is good, but it's not why I'm replying. I have also wanted a Mercurial feature in Git, but a different one than yours.

Specifically, I've wanted the 'hg absorb' command. My understanding of the commands functionality is that it builds a sort of flamegraph-esque view of the blame, and then cascades downwards parts of a change. I am sure that I'm not doing the command justice, so I'll defer to [1] where it is explained in more detail.

The benefit of this command is that it gives you a way to--without ambiguity--absorb changes into earlier commits, and in fact, the earliest commit that they make sense to belong to.

This would simplify my workflow greatly when re-rolling patches, as I often want to rewrite a part of an earlier commit. This is certainly possible by a number of different `git rebase` invocations (e.g., (1) create fixup commits, and then re-order them, or (2) mark points in your history as 'edit', and rewrite them in a detached state, and I'm sure many more).

I'm curious if you or anyone else has thought about how this might work in Git.

Thanks, Taylor

[1]: http://files.lihdd.net/hgabsorb-note.pdf