Re: [PATCH] rebase -p: Preserve fast-forwardable merges

[Alex Scarborough <alex@gameclay.com>]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Jan 2010, Alex Scarborough wrote:
>
> > Previously, rebase -p would not preserve a merge commit if the merge
> > could be resolved as a fast-forward.  rebase -p now passes --no-ff to
> > git merge when recreating a merge commit, which ensures that merge
> > commits created with git merge --no-ff are preserved.
>
> For my use case (well, it used to be my use case), namely keeping a number
> of topic branches on top of an upstream up-to-date, this is not the
> desired action.  In my use case, merged topic branches should just vanish,
> and not even leave a merge commit.

I see.  In that use case this patch would be rather irritating :)

What do you think of adding a --no-ff option to git rebase which, when used
with -p, will recreate merge commits even if they could be resolved as a
fast-forward?  That would leave your use case unchanged while giving my
use case a way out, so to speak.

Either way, I suggest we change the documentation for rebase -p to state
that it does not preserve merge commits that can be fast-forwarded after
rebasing.

If it sounds good, I should be able to roll some patches by the end of the
week.

-Alex Scarborough