summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/sequencer.h
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorElijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>2020-02-15 21:36:25 +0000
committerJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2020-02-16 15:40:42 -0800
commite98c4269c86019bfe057a91b4305f784365b6f0b (patch)
treed5642f4563733ea97e2b2bf24c461115df2c9a7f /sequencer.h
parentd48e5e21da980c6d439655a1292d0332b341c7d1 (diff)
downloadgit-e98c4269c86019bfe057a91b4305f784365b6f0b.tar.gz
rebase (interactive-backend): fix handling of commits that become empty
As established in the previous commit and commit b00bf1c9a8dd (git-rebase: make --allow-empty-message the default, 2018-06-27), the behavior for rebase with different backends in various edge or corner cases is often more happenstance than design. This commit addresses another such corner case: commits which "become empty". A careful reader may note that there are two types of commits which would become empty due to a rebase: * [clean cherry-pick] Commits which are clean cherry-picks of upstream commits, as determined by `git log --cherry-mark ...`. Re-applying these commits would result in an empty set of changes and a duplicative commit message; i.e. these are commits that have "already been applied" upstream. * [become empty] Commits which are not empty to start, are not clean cherry-picks of upstream commits, but which still become empty after being rebased. This happens e.g. when a commit has changes which are a strict subset of the changes in an upstream commit, or when the changes of a commit can be found spread across or among several upstream commits. Clearly, in both cases the changes in the commit in question are found upstream already, but the commit message may not be in the latter case. When cherry-mark can determine a commit is already upstream, then because of how cherry-mark works this means the upstream commit message was about the *exact* same set of changes. Thus, the commit messages can be assumed to be fully interchangeable (and are in fact likely to be completely identical). As such, the clean cherry-pick case represents a case when there is no information to be gained by keeping the extra commit around. All rebase types have always dropped these commits, and no one to my knowledge has ever requested that we do otherwise. For many of the become empty cases (and likely even most), we will also be able to drop the commit without loss of information -- but this isn't quite always the case. Since these commits represent cases that were not clean cherry-picks, there is no upstream commit message explaining the same set of changes. Projects with good commit message hygiene will likely have the explanation from our commit message contained within or spread among the relevant upstream commits, but not all projects run that way. As such, the commit message of the commit being rebased may have reasoning that suggests additional changes that should be made to adapt to the new base, or it may have information that someone wants to add as a note to another commit, or perhaps someone even wants to create an empty commit with the commit message as-is. Junio commented on the "become-empty" types of commits as follows[1]: WRT a change that ends up being empty (as opposed to a change that is empty from the beginning), I'd think that the current behaviour is desireable one. "am" based rebase is solely to transplant an existing history and want to stop much less than "interactive" one whose purpose is to polish a series before making it publishable, and asking for confirmation ("this has become empty--do you want to drop it?") is more appropriate from the workflow point of view. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqfu1fswdh.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com/ I would simply add that his arguments for "am"-based rebases actually apply to all non-explicitly-interactive rebases. Also, since we are stating that different cases should have different defaults, it may be worth providing a flag to allow users to select which behavior they want for these commits. Introduce a new command line flag for selecting the desired behavior: --empty={drop,keep,ask} with the definitions: drop: drop commits which become empty keep: keep commits which become empty ask: provide the user a chance to interact and pick what to do with commits which become empty on a case-by-case basis In line with Junio's suggestion, if the --empty flag is not specified, pick defaults as follows: explicitly interactive: ask otherwise: drop Signed-off-by: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'sequencer.h')
-rw-r--r--sequencer.h1
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/sequencer.h b/sequencer.h
index c165e0ff25..3b0ab9141f 100644
--- a/sequencer.h
+++ b/sequencer.h
@@ -39,6 +39,7 @@ struct replay_opts {
int allow_rerere_auto;
int allow_empty;
int allow_empty_message;
+ int drop_redundant_commits;
int keep_redundant_commits;
int verbose;
int quiet;