Re: Heads up: major rebase -i -p rework coming up

From: Marc Branchaud <marcnarc@xiplink.com>
Date: Jan 26, 2009, 16:21 UTC
Message-ID: <497DE318.2070603@xiplink.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0901242156320.14855@racer>

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand the purpose of 'was E' (or whatever syntax) in the merge command. Why is there a need to refer to E at all? The only reason I can think of is to replicate E's commit message. Am I missing something?

Come to think of it, what if the user wants to edit a merge commit's message? Should there be an 'editmerge' command?

M.

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

>
>> - Why do you need "merge D' was E"?  Shouldn't "pick E" be able to 
>>   notice that E is a merge and decompose it into "merge D' was E" 
>>   internally?
>>
>>   This one I am somewhat complaining, unless your answer is "because 
>>   this way the user could drop some parents from the merge in the 
>>   editor".
> 
> Not only that; the user could use this to fix mismerges, i.e. by replacing 
> a SHA-1 with the SHA-1 (or indeed, a short name, unless it is "was") of 
> the branch that she _actually_ wanted to merge with.
> 
>>   And if your answer is that, then my next question will be "if that is 
>>   the case, can the user be expected to easily find out which commit 
>>   each parent SHA-1 refers to, without having more hint on the 'merge' 
>>   insn line?"
> 
> Nope.
> 
> In most cases, however, that should be plenty enough:
> 
> 	merge 9383af1' was f39d50a Merge branch 'mh/unify-color' into next
> 
> The user does not have to guess much what 9383af1 might refer to.