[PATCH 0/8] rebase -i: offer to recreate merge commits

Once upon a time, I dreamt of an interactive rebase that would not flatten branch structure, but instead recreate the commit topology faithfully.

My original attempt was --preserve-merges, but that design was so limited that I did not even enable it in interactive mode.

Subsequently, it *was* enabled in interactive mode, with the predictable consequences: as the --preserve-merges design does not allow for specifying the parents of merge commits explicitly, all the new commits' parents are defined *implicitly* by the previous commit history, and hence it is *not possible to even reorder commits*.

This design flaw cannot be fixed. Not without a complete re-design, at least. This patch series offers such a re-design.

Think of --recreate-merges as "--preserve-merges done right". It introduces new verbs for the todo list, `label`, `reset` and `merge`. For a commit topology like this:

            A - B - C
              \   /
                D

the generated todo list would look like this:

            # branch D
            pick 0123 A
            label branch-point
            pick 1234 D
            label D

            reset branch-point
            pick 2345 B
            merge 3456 D C

There are more patches in the pipeline, based on this patch series, but left for later in the interest of reviewable patch series: one mini series to use the sequencer even for `git rebase -i --root`, and another one to add support for octopus merges to --recreate-merges.

Johannes Schindelin (8):
  sequencer: introduce new commands to reset the revision
  sequencer: introduce the `merge` command
  sequencer: fast-forward merge commits, if possible
  rebase-helper --make-script: introduce a flag to recreate merges
  rebase: introduce the --recreate-merges option
  sequencer: handle autosquash and post-rewrite for merge commands
  pull: accept --rebase=recreate to recreate the branch topology
  rebase -i: introduce --recreate-merges=no-rebase-cousins

 Documentation/config.txt               |   8 +
 Documentation/git-pull.txt             |   5 +-
 Documentation/git-rebase.txt           |  13 +-
 builtin/pull.c                         |  14 +-
 builtin/rebase--helper.c               |  13 +-
 builtin/remote.c                       |   2 +
 contrib/completion/git-completion.bash |   4 +-
 git-rebase--interactive.sh             |   6 +
 git-rebase.sh                          |  16 +
 refs.c                                 |   3 +-
 sequencer.c                            | 697 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 sequencer.h                            |   9 +
 t/t3430-rebase-recreate-merges.sh      | 208 ++++++++++
 13 files changed, 977 insertions(+), 21 deletions(-)
 create mode 100755 t/t3430-rebase-recreate-merges.sh

base-commit: 2512f15446149235156528dafbe75930c712b29e
Published-As: https://github.com/dscho/git/releases/tag/recreate-merges-v1
Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/dscho/git recreate-merges-v1