Re: [PATCH 0/6] rebase: command "ref" and options --rewrite-{refs,heads,tags}

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 30, 2011, 04:25 UTC
Message-ID: <BANLkTimZzMXo17eRQMSq8RBQ9FBM4ui25Q@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20110628131717.GA6822@dr-wily.mit.edu>

Hi Greg!

Greg Price writes:

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> On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 06:47:58AM -0400, Greg Price wrote:
>> I agree with your footnote -- the more general case will require a
>> more powerful sequencer to support properly.  And now I see that
>> Ramkumar Ramachandra is making progress on such a thing right now!
>> That's great news -- this is a project that has been attempted at
>> least four times, by five people (including me), in the last three
>> years.  I hope to see this round make it in -- I was actually thinking
>> about returning to the problem after seeing this series through, but I
>> would be glad to see Ram beat me to it.

You're more than welcome to join in -- all the work is public :) The latest iteration of the sequencer is in 'pu', and I'm currently busy rolling out a nicer version.

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> Hmm, on further reading I'm not sure the sequencer Ram aims to build
> this summer actually extends to the "mark" and "reset" commands (or
> the concepts of "the rewritten <commit>" and "detach" in the
> pseudo-TODO notation of your footnote) that would be required to
> implement this broader rewrite-side-branches feature.  It looks like
> the focus may be on taking the existing features of rebase and
> bringing them into C.

Yes, you're absolutely right. Bringing the existing features to C is quite a challenging task in itself, and is bound to keep me busy for the rest of the summer. I don't plan to implement the features your series introduces yet, but it's certainly a great long-term goal -- I think the current series has all the right ingredients; it just requires a lot of work before it can start providing more features.

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> This sounds great too -- it should make rebase a lot faster -- but it
> will leave open the pet project I've thought about returning to, of
> making "rebase -i -p" work correctly even when the user wants to
> rearrange the commits rather than just s/pick/edit/ etc.  That will
> require implementing a richer sequencer very like the one required for
> a general rewrite-side-branches feature.

Right. Since all this will take time, it'll probably be a good idea to get your series merged in now.

-- Ram