what is a 'sequencer'

what is a 'sequencer'

[Neal Kreitzinger]

All the talk about git 'sequencer' sounds interesting, but I don't know 
what it is.  (web search didn't help.)  Is there an explanation 
somewhere on what its supposed to do?

v/r,
neal

Re: what is a 'sequencer'

[Junio C Hamano]

Neal Kreitzinger <nkreitzinger@gmail.com> writes:

> All the talk about git 'sequencer' sounds interesting, but I don't
> know what it is.  (web search didn't help.)  Is there an explanation
> somewhere on what its supposed to do?

The sequencer is what sequences a sequence of operations ;-).

As an end user, stare at the instruction sheet "rebase -i" lets you
edit, and imagine different possibilities other than those offered by
"rebase -i" (e.g. "build on top of the history by cherry picking this
commit", "cherry pick this commit without committing, and amend the top
of of the history").

For example, wouldn't it be nice if you could say "here is a mbox---run
am to slurp the patches into commit and build history", or "merge the
history leading to this commit"?  "mark this point as :1, checkout this
other commit and continue operation"?  "now merge the commit we marked
earlier as :1 to the history"?  What other vocabularies can you imagine
to enrich your git life?

Recent additions to let "cherry-pick" and "revert" replay and revert
multiple commits are indeed built on the nascent version of this
infrastructure.