Re: [PATCH v2 6/7] rebase: write better reflog messages

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 18, 2013, 20:35 UTC
Message-ID: <7va9mn40nw.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1371581737-10013-7-git-send-email-artagnon@gmail.com>

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Now that the "checkout" invoked internally from "rebase" knows to honor
> GIT_REFLOG_ACTION, we can start to use it to write a better reflog
> message when "rebase anotherbranch", "rebase --onto branch",
> etc. internally checks out the new fork point.  We will write:
>
>   rebase: checkout master
>
> instead of the old
>
>   rebase
>
> Signed-off-by: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
> ---

So the approach taken by this round is to change everybody's assumption so far that they can start from a clean and usable GIT_REFLOG_ACTION when creating their own message, and stop depending on what is left in GIT_REFLOG_ACTION.

That would certainly allow this patch to leave whatever cruft in GIT_REFLOG_ACTION, because everybody else will now create the value to be assigned to that variable from scratch based on a new and different variable. All existing "everybody else" is converted to adjust to the new reality.

A one-shot assignment "VAR=VAL git checkout" is sometimes cumbersome to arrange, especially when what calls the "git checkout" is wrapped in a shell function like "output", I think this is an OK approach.

If we are adopting that convention, however, the new variable that holds the name of the overall program, base_reflog_action, needs to be a bit more prominently documented in the code, to let the other people know that is the new convention to follow.

Something like...

	# Use this as the prefix when setting and exporting
        # GIT_REFLOG_ACTION variable.
	base_reflog_action=am

And the fact that we are declaring the new convention and expecting everybody to stick to it should be in the log message.

Thanks.