Hi Peff, On Mon, 3 Dec 2018, Jeff King wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 03, 2018 at 08:01:44PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > > > In this sort of situation, I often whish to be able to do nested rebases. > > > Even more because it happen relatively often that I forget that I'm > > > working in a rebase and not on the head, and then it's quite natural > > > to me to type things like 'git rebase -i @^^^' while already rebasing. > > > But I suppose this has already been discussed. > > > > Varieties of this have been discussed, but no, not nested rebases. > > > > The closest we thought about was re-scheduling the latest <n> commits, > > which is now harder because of the `--rebase-merges` mode. > > > > But I think it would be doable. Your idea of a "nested" rebase actually > > opens that door quite nicely. It would not *really* be a nested rebase, > > and it would still only be possible in interactive mode, but I could > > totally see > > > > git rebase --nested -i HEAD~3 > > > > to generate and prepend the following lines to the `git-rebase-todo` file: > > > > reset abcdef01 # This is HEAD~3 > > pick abcdef02 # This is HEAD~2 > > pick abcdef03 # This is HEAD~ > > pick abcdef04 # This is HEAD > > > > (assuming that the latest 3 commits were non-merge commits; It would look > > quite a bit more complicated in other situations.) > > Yeah, I would probably use that if it existed. I kind of use it, even if it does not exist ;-) > It would be nicer to have real nested sequencer operations, I think, for > other situations. I agree. But for the moment, our data format is too married to the exact layout of .git/, thanks to `git rebase`'s evolution from a Unix shell script. Alban has this really great patch series to work on the todo list in-memory, and that paves the way to decouple the entire sequencer thing from the file system. The most notably thing that still would need to be encapsulated would be the options: currently, there is a plethora of inconsistent options files being saved into the state directory (for some, the mere presence indicates `true`, some contain `true` or `false`, others contain text, etc). > E.g., cherry-picking a sequence of commits while you're in the middle of > a rebase. You will be delighted to learn that you can cherry-pick a sequence of commits in the middle of a rebase already. I do `exec git cherry-pick <range>` *all* the time. > But I suspect getting that right would be _loads_ more work, and > probably would involve some funky UI corner cases to handle the stack of > operations (so truly aborting a rebase may mean an arbitrary number of > "rebase --abort" calls to pop the stack). Your suggestion is probably a > reasonable trick in the meantime. You know what is an even more reasonable trick? Worktrees. I only thought about that this morning, but I should have mentioned it right away, as I use it quite frequently. When I have tricky nested rebases to perform, I do use throw-away worktrees where I check out unnamed branches, work on those, and then integrate them back into the "outer rebase" via the `reset` command in the todo list. Ciao, Dscho
