Imagine working on one larger feature (or even multiple features). You already have created a couple of local commits, but are not yet finished. Following use cases come to my mind:

1) some other developer commits new revisions
- it should be possible to continue working on your feature-queue keeping it based on the old revision, but sooner or later it comes the time to integrate the new revision(s) - this means to create a new queue on the new revision and cherry-pick all local commits of the old queue onto this new revision (could this be done with purely local information or would each cherry-pick require a possibly slow communication with the server?) - with each cherry-pick, a conflict might occur - aborting should abort the creation of the new queue and application of the old queue, resulting in the deletion of the partly finished new queue keeping the old one
- each queue should be rebased independently onto the new revisions

2) you have to make a quick-fix revision
- you need to switch from your local feature-queue to the latest revision and fix the bug a coworker requests to get fixed - you may now switch back to your queue to proceed with the work, but there is a new revision now, so you should base your work sooner or later on that revision

3) you want to rework your local commits, e.g. change order, squash some commits, change the message
- create a new queue based on the same revision
- create new local commits by cherry-picking commits from the other (old) queue, maybe amending some local commits - after the new queue is ready (verify to diff it with the old queue) the old queue can be deleted - often enough I find it useful to be able to make one of my first feature commits public, so the x first local commits should be possible to be become revisions => the queue becomes shorter and based on the new revision(s)

4) you need to fork an existing queue at any local commit
- switching to one of the local commits of your current queue you detect that it contains a flaw - creating now a local commit to fix would mean to first create a new queue based on the same revision, apply all previous local commits (no conflict risk) - the old queue would be kept


It might be useful to be able to "store" somehow one or another queue on the server, e.g. for backup reasons, so no change is lost if my hard disk crashes or my code fails and cleans the disk. (Creating a new, real feature branch with revisions in the repository I don't like because then they would be cut in stone and this would force me to create nice and clean commits. But because we are not without error, such code will contain back and forth changes and hence hard to read.)

As long as I'm working on a non-trivial feature/refactoring, I prefer to have complete control over my commits, I even like to commit completely unstable and incomplete code with Git - because I have the possibility to clean up later.

--
Best regards,
Thomas Singer



On 02/07/2019 18:32, Nathan Hartman wrote:
On Sun, Jun 30, 2019 at 11:22 AM Thomas Singer <thomas.sin...@syntevo.com>
wrote:

With "rebasing" I mean, that such list of "local commits" needs to be
re-applied (on demand, not automatically) onto a different revision.
Something like a continues series of cherry-picking (with the
possibility to get a conflict in each step; and a possibility to
continue after conflict resolution or abort). This means to me, that at
least cherry-picking needs to be possible from a revision or a "local
commit".


Could you describe how you would like to use this capability? E.g.,
give an example use case?

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