Re: interactive rebase should better highlight the not-applying commit

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Joshua,

On Wed, 12 Oct 2016, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 06:24:37PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> > But maybe I read it all wrong and you do want to make this happen
> > yourself, and you simply want a little advice how to go about it?
> 
> Ugh, if you insist.

I don't. If you want that feature to see the light of day, you should
insist yourself ;-)

> > > On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 02:25:19PM -0700, Stefan Beller wrote:
> > > > On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 12:07 PM, Joshua N Pritikin <jpritikin@pobox.com> wrote:
> > > > However IIUC currently rebase is completely rewritten/ported to C 
> > > > where it is easier to add color support as we do have some color 
> > > > support in there already.
> > > 
> > > Sounds great. Is there a beta release that I can try out?
> > 
> > There is no release as such, unless you count Git for Windows v2.10.0.
> 
> Nope, that doesn't count. ;-)

Sometimes honesty goes too far. You basically told me that what I work on
does not count. That does not exactly curry my favor.

> > But you can try the `interactive-rebase` branch of
> > https://github.com/dscho/git; please note, though, that my main aim
> > was to be as faithful as possible in the conversion (modulo speed, of
> > course).
> 
> Hm OK
> 
> > > Sometimes I do a rebase to fix some tiny thing 10-15 commits from HEAD.
> > > Maybe only 1 file is affected and there are no merge conflicts, but when
> > > rebase reapplies all the commits, the timestamps of lots of unmodified
> > > files change even though they are unmodified compared to before the
> > > rebase.
> > 
> > Well, they *were* modified, right?
> 
> Were they? Isn't that just an artefact of the implementation?

Yes, they were modified, as the todo script you saved for the interactive
rebase to perform told it to cherry-pick those changes. That is a worktree
operation, performing on files, not a repository operation working on
objects in Git's database.

> > A workaround would be to create a new worktree using the awesome `git
> > worktree` command, perform the rebase there (on an unnamed branch --
> > AKA "detached HEAD", no relation to Helloween), and then come back to
> > the original worktree and reset --hard to the new revision. That reset
> > would detect that there are actually no changes required to said
> > files.
> 
> What would be the problem with doing this by default? Or could it be a
> configuration option that can be enabled?

It could definitely be a new feature that is triggered by a new (opt-in)
configuration option.

It cannot be on by default, at least not in the short run, because those
cherry-picks can fail with merge conflicts and power users of the
interactive rebase expect those conflicts to show in the current worktree.

Ciao,
Johannes