Re: Prompt for merge message?

From: Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Oct 6, 2011, 22:09 UTC
Message-ID: <CAJo=hJvFytscxyx2z+Fdw9E1DS02wSXgoE3SHkxKq2OYOMQHgQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vsjn5ye0x.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 15:02, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> "Todd A. Jacobs" <nospam+listmail@codegnome.org> writes:
>
>> I often find myself using "--no-ff -m foo" for merging short-lived
>> branches, because the merge commit usually needs to say something
>> about having finished a feature rather than referring to a branch that
>> will be deleted shortly anyway....
>> ... Is there currently a way to get git to prompt for the merge message,
>> rather than using the default or requiring the -m flag? If not, isn't
>> this a common-enough use case to have that ability added to the merge
>> function?
>
> Others commented on the current practices and gave their own useful tips
> already, but an additional hint is to name your branch more sensibly, so
> that you do not feel it is useless to record it in the history.
>
> As to a real longer-term solution, I wouldn't mind a patch that teaches
> "git merge" an "-e" option just like "git commit" has.
>
>    $ git commit -m "Finish frotz feature" -e -a
>    ... editor opens with the first line filled already here ...
>
> is something I find myself using fairly often.

What about adding something like:

  if (isatty(0) && isatty(1) && isatty(2)) {
    do_interactive_commit();
  }

to git merge? I know the reason we don't want to do it all of the time is because git merge is already used in a lot of scripts. But how many of those are running with an active terminal on all 3 standard fds when it runs git merge?