Re: [PATCH] branch -l: print useful info whilst rebasing a non-local branch

From: Kaartic Sivaraam <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 25, 2018, 03:41 UTC
Message-ID: <87ea8cac-c745-b7e6-7804-5116cd94ed48@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cQ8xw23SGhpx5qtDEyzJGR1v4L2Lm9tEWe56Rh3c8Q3cg@mail.gmail.com>

On Sunday 25 March 2018 07:04 AM, Eric Sunshine wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 2:38 PM, Kaartic Sivaraam
> <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com> wrote:
>> When rebasing interacitvely (rebase -i), "git branch -l" prints a line
> 
> The "git branch -l" threw me since "-l" is short for --create-reflog.
> I'm guessing you meant "git branch --list".
>

That's surprising, I just tried "git branch -l" on a repository and I did get a list of branch names. Is this a consequence of some option parsing weirdness ?!

To be honest, I actually assumed "-l" to be a shorthand for "--list" and didn't check with it in the documentation; which I should have. Sorry, for that. I still wonder why "git branch -l" prints a list of branch names when it is not a shorthand for "--list" ? (BTW, I'm also surprised by the fact that "-l" is not act shorthand for "--list"!)

Regardless, I'll update the commit message to use "--list" in place of "-l".

Show 10 quoted lines

>> indicating the current branch being rebased. This works well when the
>> interactive rebase was intiated when a local branch is checked out.
>>
>> This doesn't play well when the rebase was initiated on a remote
>> branch or an arbitrary commit that is not pointed to by a local
>> branch.
> 
> A shorter way of saying "arbitrary commit ... not pointed at by local
> branch" would be "detached HEAD".
>

Thanks. I was actually searching for this word. It didn't strike when I wrote the commit message, yesterday.

Show 7 quoted lines

> You could collapse the whole thing back down to:
> 
>     strbuf_addf(&desc, _("(no branch, rebasing %s)"),
>         state.branch ? state.branch : state.detached_from);
> 
> which means you don't need the 'rebasing' variable or the braces.
>

Nice point.

> Can we have a couple new tests: one checking "git branch --list" for
> the typical case (when rebasing off a named branch) and one checking
> when rebasing from a detached HEAD?
>

Sure, but I guess it would take some time for me to add the tests. I'll send a v2 with the suggested changes.

-- 
Kaartic