Re: Feature Request: `git commit --amend-to`

From: Fabian Stelzer <fs@gigacodes.de>
Date: Sep 30, 2021, 08:05 UTC
Message-ID: <435d33d0-8991-d8c5-85b0-928ec97310c6@gigacodes.de>
In-Reply-To: <kl6lwnmzpbhq.fsf@chooglen-macbookpro.roam.corp.google.com>

On 29.09.21 18:55, Glen Choo wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>> [...] I think the problem
>>> has more to do with how Git manages merges and conflicts and less to do
>>> with having shortcuts in the CLI.
>>
>> I think that users who'd like an --amend-to would probably be happy with
>> or might want to try out something like "hg absorb", which is something
>> I think we should have stolen in git already, but it's never too late.
> 
> Agree. I think some "hg absorb" features get at the heart of what I
> meant, which is that users would benefit from making this merge conflict
> resolution a lot simpler.
>

I have never used hg absorb but after reading about its concepts i think it best maps to something like git automatically creating fixup commits for you. I also found https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb (also untested by me) which claims to do exactly this.

Something like having "git commit -a --fixup" (without any commit hash) create matching fixup commits for all changes i made would already be quite cool.

From what i see from our corporate environments and github/bitbucket workflows though i think most users never even heard about fixup commits or ever did an interactive rebase (this is totally a view from my corporate bubble and might not really represent the average git userbase). Most code review workflows i see don't focus on individual commits and only present the complete final patch (some at least allow you to view individual commits but not much more) and therefore users have no big incentive during review to shape their changes into proper commits. Some tools (like phabricator) even squash the final patch into a single commit by default which i think is a good idea if single commits are of no concern during review anyway.

I wonder if something like an easy to use "absorb" feature (without fixups, rebases) might encourage and produce more clean commit histories even for the mentioned workflows.