RE: Rebase Question

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

Andrew Ottaviano wrote:
> The difficulty with this is that if I have merge conflicts that show
> up on my first commit, I have to resolve that stupid thing for every
> subsequent commit.

I don't quite understand that. If you have resolved the chunk, then that
chunk is resolved, and the rest of the commits don't have to worry
about that...

Unless they touch *precisely* the same lines as the first commit, in
which case... Yeah, you have to resolve that stupid thing over and over.

> The solution that I thought of is instead of resolving conflicts from
> the bottom up (starting with earliest history), resolving from the top
> down (latest to earliest) and resolving the conflict in the commit it
> occurred.

Well, this is interesting because it's something I've wanted to write
about for a long time, and it's what I call my "pronged approach".


I actually do *both*; I do a rebase and fix the problems from 1) the bottom-up,
but after I have resolved the conflicts from 2) the top-down. In 1)
(bottom-up) I resolve the conflicts in a rebase, and in 2) I resolve the
conflicts in merge, but in *both* the end result sould be the exactly
same [`git diff 1) 2)` is empty].

Yes, it is more work, but at the end of the day I'm 100% sure I did the
rebase right, so I don't have to think about it that much; either
there's a diff or there isn't.

In fact, I rarely do just one rebase, because quite often I miss things,
so I do a second, or third, or fourth rebase, but at the end I make sure
that the diff with the merge (top-down approach) is the same.

To facilitate this work I use two tools: 1) git rerere [1] (others have
mentioned this), and 2) git reintegrate [2] (only useful if there's more
than one branch you are merging).


Yeah, it's a lot of work, but I'd rather do a lot of tedious work that
I'm 100% sure is correct, than do a little bit of work that I can't
easily verify.

Cheers.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rerere
[2] https://github.com/felipec/git-reintegrate

-- 
Felipe Contreras