Why won't "git rebase -Xrenormalize -i $REBASE_SHA" do anything?

Hello,

I've added "* text=auto" to an existing repo with a completely linear history.

Now, as expected, every rebase operation gives me lots of conflicts, which are hard to resolve.

So I'd like to clean up the history:

  $ git rebase -Xrenormalize -i $REBASE_SHA

But this turns out to be a no-op? It says immediately

  Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/wip-normalize

without even the counter which is usually output to show progress during an interactive rebase as it is working through the rebase-todo. I can confirm that nothing has happened by checking the sha of the branch.

So, what am I missing? How would I renormalize all the commits of a branch? The branch has linear history, no merges there.

Thanks,

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 12:01:50PM +0100, Josef Wolf wrote:

What exactly does this mean ? Is there one branch, several branches ? No merges at all ?

That is a tricky question. If you renormalize all commits of one branch, you create a complete new history, right ? Just out of interest: Why do you want to do this ? And I have the slight feeling, that Git does not support this "renormalize all the commits of a branch" workflow, but I may be wrong.

Is you repo public ? Or could you come up with an example ?

On 2022-01-31 at 11:01:50, Josef Wolf wrote:

I think what you probably want is to add the -f option. By default, Git doesn't perform a rebase when the current branch is up to date with the base branch. If you want to do it anyway, in this case, to rewrite commits, then -f should make that happen.