RE: Rebase Question

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: May 12, 2021, 07:23 UTC
Message-ID: <609b827884bfd_6e0fc2083c@natae.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <MN2PR07MB59526F40B255183931649AD19C529@MN2PR07MB5952.namprd07.prod.outlook.com>

Andrew Ottaviano wrote:

> The difficulty with this is that if I have merge conflicts that show
> up on my first commit, I have to resolve that stupid thing for every
> subsequent commit.

I don't quite understand that. If you have resolved the chunk, then that chunk is resolved, and the rest of the commits don't have to worry about that...

Unless they touch *precisely* the same lines as the first commit, in which case... Yeah, you have to resolve that stupid thing over and over.

> The solution that I thought of is instead of resolving conflicts from
> the bottom up (starting with earliest history), resolving from the top
> down (latest to earliest) and resolving the conflict in the commit it
> occurred.

Well, this is interesting because it's something I've wanted to write about for a long time, and it's what I call my "pronged approach".

I actually do *both*; I do a rebase and fix the problems from 1) the bottom-up, but after I have resolved the conflicts from 2) the top-down. In 1) (bottom-up) I resolve the conflicts in a rebase, and in 2) I resolve the conflicts in merge, but in *both* the end result sould be the exactly same [`git diff 1) 2)` is empty].

Yes, it is more work, but at the end of the day I'm 100% sure I did the rebase right, so I don't have to think about it that much; either there's a diff or there isn't.

In fact, I rarely do just one rebase, because quite often I miss things, so I do a second, or third, or fourth rebase, but at the end I make sure that the diff with the merge (top-down approach) is the same.

To facilitate this work I use two tools: 1) git rerere [1] (others have mentioned this), and 2) git reintegrate [2] (only useful if there's more than one branch you are merging).

Yeah, it's a lot of work, but I'd rather do a lot of tedious work that I'm 100% sure is correct, than do a little bit of work that I can't easily verify.

Cheers.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rerere [2] https://github.com/felipec/git-reintegrate

-- 
Felipe Contreras