Re: [PATCH] Mod. gitk to support REBASE (with stash support).

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 9, 2007, 05:51 UTC
Message-ID: <85odhhntmb.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <20070809032610.GA24573@spearce.org>

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> writes:

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> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
>> > General question: should this not be in git-gui rather than gitk?  Gitk as 
>> > of now is really more a viewing tool.
>> 
>> Well, yes.  But git-gui only works on a single branch head at a time,
>> and that is not enough for rebasing.
>
> Sure.  But so does git's command line tools.  They tend to only
> work on a single branch at time, the one called `HEAD`.

"tend", and many accept an explicit override: rebase accepts three commit names, for example. Those that _write_ into the repository usually _end_ up at HEAD, but most need not start there.

And git-gui does not have any operation either looking at or working other than on the current HEAD. No diff, no file view, no rebase, nothing.

> So "single branch head at a time" is *not* why git-gui doesn't
> support rebase.  Its because nobody has gotten around to writing it.

I never claimed that it is not possible to put a rebase in there (the patch does this, after all). I just said that it does not _fit_ in there since you can't actually look at what you are rebasing on.

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>> Could git-gui perhaps be merged with giggle at some point of time?
>
> Unlikely.  A while ago I considered "Stay in Tcl/Tk or move to
> something more 'powerful/better/faster/Linus friendly'" and stayed
> in Tcl/Tk.  I doubt git-gui will leave Tcl/Tk.  giggle is Gtk based.

My bad: git-gui has a nice polished look on my systems (Ubuntu Feisty) while gitk has an ugly retro-blockish old-font Tk look; so not looking at the innards, I had assumed they were implemented using different systems.

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> I decided that any sort of rebase operation in git-gui must be *at
> least* as easy to use/user friendly as `rebase -i` is.  Anything
> less is just mocking the end-user.  Or something like that.  Anyway,
> since git-gui is restricted to a graphical interface and most such
> interfaces have these pointy rodents available we can do fancy
> things like dragging to express what we want to have happen, instead
> of moving lines of text around.
>
> Want to write a patch (or series of patches) for git-gui?

User interfaces are really not what I am good at, and I don't even have enough time to deal with the things I am good at.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum