Re: [PATCH 1/4] sequencer: Do not require `allow_empty` for redundant commit options

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 23, 2024, 18:18 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqy1cfnca7.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <7bf5036b-9f55-4451-a13c-8a2c815dfbb7@gmail.com>

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

>> This implication of `--allow-empty` therefore seems incorrect: One
>> should be able to keep a commit that becomes empty without also being
>> forced to pick commits that start as empty.
>
> Do you have a practical example of where you want to keep the commits
> that become empty but not the ones that start empty? I agree there is
> a distinction but I think the common case is that the user wants to
> keep both types of empty commit or none. I'm not against giving the
> user the option to keep one or the other if it is useful but I'm wary
> of changing the default.

This may not a new issue introduced by this series, but one thing I would be worried about the usability of the keep-redundant is that I know it takes more than one tries of cherry-picking of the same series, at least to me, to get a series right. The initial attempt may make some commit empty and thanks to --keep-redundant they will be kept, but I'll inevitably find more things I need to tweak and cherry-pick the resulting series, possibly on a different base. And to this second round of cherry-pick, these "were not, but now have become empty" commits appear empty from the start.