Re: git-rebase-walk

From: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
Date: Oct 1, 2026, 15:51 UTC
Message-ID: <ar5-7ZtM6C23H-8m@debian>
In-Reply-To: <ar5eereSq91xldo-@pks.im>

Hi Patrick,

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> Date: 2026-10-01 15:22:02+0200
> From: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
>
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Oct 01, 2026 at 01:58:42PM +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > Hi!
> > 
> > I use this little command to apply iterative rebases, which are easier
> > to handle when there are large conflicts.  Are you interested in it?
> > 
> > 	$ cat $(which git-rebase-walk)
> > 	#!/bin/bash
> > 
> > 	set -Eeufo pipefail;
> > 
> > 	git merge-base HEAD "$1" \
> > 	| xargs -I{} git log --oneline {}.."$1" \
> > 	| cut -f1 -d' ' \
> > 	| tac \
> > 	| while read -r c; do
> > 		git rebase "$c";
> > 	done;
> > 
> > The source code is trivial, so I guess I don't need to explain much.
> > It behaves quite nicely, IME.
> > 
> > You may of course want to adapt it a little bit for merging in git(1).
> > I could help improve it a little bit.
> 
> this reminds me a bit of git-imerge [1]. What this tool does is to
> basically perform a merge between two branches incrementally using a
> matrix. The tool tries to address exactly your use case, which is to
> "present the user with one pairwise conflict at a time for resolution".

Yup, from the description, it seems to do the same thing. Thanks! I've also seen at least one other tool that does the same thing.

> Maybe that tool is interesting to you.

Not much, because I prefer a 9-line shell script that's robust as a rock vs. a 4k+ LoC python script for the same functionality. :-)

> But it's certainly fallen a bit
> out of date, as it hasn't received any updates for more than 6 years by
> now. Chances are it stll works alright though.

My script I use it in shadow-utils and in the Linux man-pages project, and is in use today. I was wondering if there was interest in integrating it to git(1). If not, I will likely provide it in the man-pages repository as a help tool (which might end up packed by distros as part of manpages-utils). Is that okay to you? (I ask mainly because it's using the git- namespace for commands, so you should at lease be aware of it.)

Have a lovely day! Alex

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> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Patrick
> 
> [1]: https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge

-- 
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