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 at an answer 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 flatten the branch topology 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 `--recreate-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> <oneline>`. And once this mode has 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.schinde...@gmx.de> --- Documentation/git-rebase.txt | 8 +- contrib/completion/git-completion.bash | 2 +- git-rebase--interactive.sh | 1 + git-rebase.sh | 6 ++ t/t3430-rebase-recreate-merges.sh | 146 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 5 files changed, 161 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) create mode 100755 t/t3430-rebase-recreate-merges.sh diff --git a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt index 8a861c1e0d6..1d061373288 100644 --- a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt +++ b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt @@ -368,6 +368,11 @@ The commit list format can be changed by setting the configuration option rebase.instructionFormat. A customized instruction format will automatically have the long commit hash prepended to the format. +--recreate-merges:: + Recreate merge commits instead of flattening the history by replaying + merges. Merge conflict resolutions or manual amendments to merge + commits are not preserved. + -p:: --preserve-merges:: Recreate merge commits instead of flattening the history by replaying @@ -770,7 +775,8 @@ BUGS The todo list presented by `--preserve-merges --interactive` does not represent the topology of the revision graph. Editing commits and rewording their commit messages should work fine, but attempts to -reorder commits tend to produce counterintuitive results. +reorder commits tend to produce counterintuitive results. Use +--recreate-merges for a more faithful representation. For example, an attempt to rearrange ------------ diff --git a/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash b/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash index 3683c772c55..6893c3adabc 100644 --- a/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash +++ b/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash @@ -2008,7 +2008,7 @@ _git_rebase () --*) __gitcomp " --onto --merge --strategy --interactive - --preserve-merges --stat --no-stat + --recreate-merges --preserve-merges --stat --no-stat --committer-date-is-author-date --ignore-date --ignore-whitespace --whitespace= --autosquash --no-autosquash diff --git a/git-rebase--interactive.sh b/git-rebase--interactive.sh index 5bf1ea3781f..3459ec5a018 100644 --- a/git-rebase--interactive.sh +++ b/git-rebase--interactive.sh @@ -900,6 +900,7 @@ fi if test t != "$preserve_merges" then git rebase--helper --make-script ${keep_empty:+--keep-empty} \ + ${recreate_merges:+--recreate-merges} \ $revisions ${restrict_revision+^$restrict_revision} >"$todo" || die "$(gettext "Could not generate todo list")" else diff --git a/git-rebase.sh b/git-rebase.sh index fd72a35c65b..d69bc7d0e0d 100755 --- a/git-rebase.sh +++ b/git-rebase.sh @@ -17,6 +17,7 @@ q,quiet! be quiet. implies --no-stat autostash automatically stash/stash pop before and after fork-point use 'merge-base --fork-point' to refine upstream onto=! rebase onto given branch instead of upstream +recreate-merges! try to recreate merges instead of skipping them p,preserve-merges! try to recreate merges instead of ignoring them s,strategy=! use the given merge strategy no-ff! cherry-pick all commits, even if unchanged @@ -86,6 +87,7 @@ type= state_dir= # One of {'', continue, skip, abort}, as parsed from command line action= +recreate_merges= preserve_merges= autosquash= keep_empty= @@ -262,6 +264,10 @@ do --keep-empty) keep_empty=yes ;; + --recreate-merges) + recreate_merges=t + test -z "$interactive_rebase" && interactive_rebase=implied + ;; --preserve-merges) preserve_merges=t test -z "$interactive_rebase" && interactive_rebase=implied diff --git a/t/t3430-rebase-recreate-merges.sh b/t/t3430-rebase-recreate-merges.sh new file mode 100755 index 00000000000..46ae52f88b3 --- /dev/null +++ b/t/t3430-rebase-recreate-merges.sh @@ -0,0 +1,146 @@ +#!/bin/sh +# +# Copyright (c) 2017 Johannes E. Schindelin +# + +test_description='git rebase -i --recreate-merges + +This test runs git rebase "interactively", retaining the branch structure by +recreating merge commits. + +Initial setup: + + -- B -- (first) + / \ + A - C - D - E - H (master) + \ / + F - G (second) +' +. ./test-lib.sh +. "$TEST_DIRECTORY"/lib-rebase.sh + +test_expect_success 'setup' ' + write_script replace-editor.sh <<-\EOF && + mv "$1" "$(git rev-parse --git-path ORIGINAL-TODO)" + cp script-from-scratch "$1" + EOF + + test_commit A && + git checkout -b first && + test_commit B && + git checkout master && + test_commit C && + test_commit D && + git merge --no-commit B && + test_tick && + git commit -m E && + git tag -m E E && + git checkout -b second C && + test_commit F && + test_commit G && + git checkout master && + git merge --no-commit G && + test_tick && + git commit -m H && + git tag -m H H +' + +cat >script-from-scratch <<\EOF +label onto + +# onebranch +pick G +pick D +label onebranch + +# second +bud +pick B +label second + +bud +merge H second +merge - onebranch Merge the topic branch 'onebranch' +EOF + +test_cmp_graph () { + cat >expect && + git log --graph --boundary --format=%s "$@" >output && + sed "s/ *$//" <output >output.trimmed && + test_cmp expect output.trimmed +} + +test_expect_success 'create completely different structure' ' + test_config sequence.editor \""$PWD"/replace-editor.sh\" && + test_tick && + git rebase -i --recreate-merges A && + test_cmp_graph <<-\EOF + * Merge the topic branch '\''onebranch'\'' + |\ + | * D + | * G + * | H + |\ \ + | |/ + |/| + | * B + |/ + * A + EOF +' + +test_expect_success 'generate correct todo list' ' + cat >expect <<-\EOF && + label onto + + bud + pick d9df450 B + label E + + bud + pick 5dee784 C + label branch-point + pick ca2c861 F + pick 088b00a G + label H + + reset branch-point C + pick 12bd07b D + merge 2051b56 E E + merge 233d48a H H + + EOF + + grep -v "^#" <.git/ORIGINAL-TODO >output && + test_cmp expect output +' + +test_expect_success 'with a branch tip that was cherry-picked already' ' + git checkout -b already-upstream master && + base="$(git rev-parse --verify HEAD)" && + + test_commit A1 && + test_commit A2 && + git reset --hard $base && + test_commit B1 && + test_tick && + git merge -m "Merge branch A" A2 && + + git checkout -b upstream-with-a2 $base && + test_tick && + git cherry-pick A2 && + + git checkout already-upstream && + test_tick && + git rebase -i --recreate-merges upstream-with-a2 && + test_cmp_graph upstream-with-a2.. <<-\EOF + * Merge branch A + |\ + | * A1 + * | B1 + |/ + o A2 + EOF +' + +test_done -- 2.15.1.windows.2.1430.ga56c4f9e2a9
