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Once upon a time, this here developer thought: wouldn't it be nice if, say, Git for Windows' patches on top of core Git could be represented as a thicket of branches, and be rebased on top of core Git in order to maintain a cherry-pick'able set of patch series? The original attempt to answer this was: git rebase --preserve-merges. However, that experiment was never intended as an interactive option, and it only piggy-backed on git rebase --interactive because that command's implementation looked already very, very familiar: it was designed by the same person who designed --preserve-merges: yours truly. Some time later, some other developer (I am looking at you, Andreas! ;-)) decided that it would be a good idea to allow --preserve-merges to be combined with --interactive (with caveats!) and the Git maintainer (well, the interim Git maintainer during Junio's absence, that is) agreed, and that is when the glamor of the --preserve-merges design started to fall apart rather quickly and unglamorously. The reason? In --preserve-merges mode, the parents of a merge commit (or for that matter, of *any* commit) were not stated explicitly, but were *implied* by the commit name passed to the `pick` command. This made it impossible, for example, to reorder commits. Not to mention to move commits between branches or, deity forbid, to split topic branches into two. Alas, these shortcomings also prevented that mode (whose original purpose was to serve Git for Windows' needs, with the additional hope that it may be useful to others, too) from serving Git for Windows' needs. Five years later, when it became really untenable to have one unwieldy, big hodge-podge patch series of partly related, partly unrelated patches in Git for Windows that was rebased onto core Git's tags from time to time (earning the undeserved wrath of the developer of the ill-fated git-remote-hg series that first obsoleted Git for Windows' competing approach, only to be abandoned without maintainer later) was really untenable, the "Git garden shears" were born [*1*/*2*]: a script, piggy-backing on top of the interactive rebase, that would first determine the branch topology of the patches to be rebased, create a pseudo todo list for further editing, transform the result into a real todo list (making heavy use of the `exec` command to "implement" the missing todo list commands) and finally recreate the patch series on top of the new base commit. That was in 2013. And it took about three weeks to come up with the design and implement it as an out-of-tree script. Needless to say, the implementation needed quite a few years to stabilize, all the while the design itself proved itself sound. With this patch, the goodness of the Git garden shears comes to `git rebase -i` itself. Passing the `--rebase-merges` option will generate a todo list that can be understood readily, and where it is obvious how to reorder commits. New branches can be introduced by inserting `label` commands and calling `merge <label>`. And once this mode will have become stable and universally accepted, we can deprecate the design mistake that was `--preserve-merges`. Link *1*: https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit/blob/master/share/msysGit/shears.sh Link *2*: https://github.com/git-for-windows/build-extra/blob/master/shears.sh Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> |
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| completion | ||
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| diff-highlight | ||
| emacs | ||
| examples | ||
| fast-import | ||
| git-jump | ||
| git-shell-commands | ||
| hg-to-git | ||
| hooks | ||
| long-running-filter | ||
| mw-to-git | ||
| persistent-https | ||
| remote-helpers | ||
| stats | ||
| subtree | ||
| svn-fe | ||
| thunderbird-patch-inline | ||
| update-unicode | ||
| workdir | ||
| convert-grafts-to-replace-refs.sh | ||
| git-resurrect.sh | ||
| README | ||
| remotes2config.sh | ||
| rerere-train.sh | ||
Contributed Software Although these pieces are available as part of the official git source tree, they are in somewhat different status. The intention is to keep interesting tools around git here, maybe even experimental ones, to give users an easier access to them, and to give tools wider exposure, so that they can be improved faster. I am not expecting to touch these myself that much. As far as my day-to-day operation is concerned, these subdirectories are owned by their respective primary authors. I am willing to help if users of these components and the contrib/ subtree "owners" have technical/design issues to resolve, but the initiative to fix and/or enhance things _must_ be on the side of the subtree owners. IOW, I won't be actively looking for bugs and rooms for enhancements in them as the git maintainer -- I may only do so just as one of the users when I want to scratch my own itch. If you have patches to things in contrib/ area, the patch should be first sent to the primary author, and then the primary author should ack and forward it to me (git pull request is nicer). This is the same way as how I have been treating gitk, and to a lesser degree various foreign SCM interfaces, so you know the drill. I expect that things that start their life in the contrib/ area to graduate out of contrib/ once they mature, either by becoming projects on their own, or moving to the toplevel directory. On the other hand, I expect I'll be proposing removal of disused and inactive ones from time to time. If you have new things to add to this area, please first propose it on the git mailing list, and after a list discussion proves there are some general interests (it does not have to be a list-wide consensus for a tool targeted to a relatively narrow audience -- for example I do not work with projects whose upstream is svn, so I have no use for git-svn myself, but it is of general interest for people who need to interoperate with SVN repositories in a way git-svn works better than git-svnimport), submit a patch to create a subdirectory of contrib/ and put your stuff there. -jc