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

From: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Date: Jun 18, 2009, 07:20 UTC
Message-ID: <4A39EAAB.70402@alum.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20090618063348.6117@nanako3.lavabit.com>

Nanako Shiraishi wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> When the commit log message begins with "squash to ...", and there
> is a commit whose title begins with the same ..., automatically
> modify the todo list of rebase -i so that the commit marked for
> squashing come right after the commit to be modified, and change
> the action of the moved commit from pick to squash.

It seems to me that even this requires more steps than strictly necessary, namely a commit then a rebase, and conveying the information from the commit step to the rebase step is somewhat awkward. Since I have to specify a magic commit message to trigger this behavior, I obviously know at the time of the commit that I want to squash the new changes onto an older commit. So why not implement this functionality as a variant of "commit"? Something like:

git commit --fix=old-commit

which would commit the changes in index as an amendment to the specified old-commit (requiring no new log message) and then rebase later commits on top of the new (combined) commit.

If a conflict arises while applying the changes in index to old-commit, then probably the whole process should be undone and aborted. If a conflict arises while rebasing later commits on top of the combined commit, then the usual rebase conflict-handling machinery would be invoked.

Michael