Re: [RFC/PATCH] rebase--interactive: Add "sign" command

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Aug 3, 2016, 14:31 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1608031621590.107993@virtualbox>
In-Reply-To: <20160803084743.3299-1-judge.packham@gmail.com>

Hi Chris,

On Wed, 3 Aug 2016, Chris Packham wrote:

> This is similar to the existing "reword" command in that it can be used
> to update the commit message the difference is that the editor presented
> to the user for the commit. It provides a useful shorthand for "exec git
> commit --amend --no-edit -s"

I can understand how this "sign" command helps you. I myself wished for new commands when working on my Git garden shears [*1*] (essentially, what git rebase --interactive --preserve-merges *should* have been).

My solution was to introduce a new fake editor that calls the real editor and afterwards converts the "new" commands into exec lines.

Having said that, this patch clashes seriously with my current effort to move a lot of the interactive rebase from shell into plain C. It is actually ready, but getting this into the code base is really slow-going, unfortunately.

Now, after looking at your patch it looks to me as if this would be easily ported, so there is not a big deal here.

However, I could imagine that we actually want this to be more extensible. After all, all you are doing is to introduce a new rebase -i command that does nothing else than shelling out to a command. Why not introduce a much more flexible feature, where you add something like "rebase -i aliases"?

Maybe something like this:

[rebase "command"]
	sign = git commit --amend -s --no-post-rewrite --no-edit -S

I have not completely thought this through, but maybe this direction would make the interactive rebase even more powerful?

Ciao, Johannes