Re: git rebase --continue automatic --skip?

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Peter Baumann <waste.manager@gmx.de> writes:

> This was mentioned before on the list (sorry, don't have a reference, 
> but it was a long time ago). AFAIR the reason it wasn't implemented yet is that
> you will lose the commit message, which might contain precious information.

I don't recall ever seeing that justification; and I don't agree with it
either.  As far as the resulting history is concerned, that commit does
not even exist and there is no precious information.

This is a tangent, but I suspect that in the very old days, after a "git
rebase" stopped due to a conflict to have you adjust the change by
resolving conflicts, "git rebase --continue" may have offered you an
opportunity to edit the commit log message so that you can record what was
made unnecessary (or made additionally necessary) compared to the original
patch due to rebasing.  I don't offhand know when we lost that feature (it
is possible we never had anything like that and I am misremembering
things).

We may probably want to add it at least as an optional feature.  After
"git rebase" stops due to a conflict, and your resolution ends up to be
not an empty change, "git rebase --continue" seems to simply reuse the
original description these days.  It might be a good default, but in cases
where the conflict resolution made the change very different from the
original, the old log message may not describe why the change was needed
and how the change solved that issue properly in the context of the new
history.

"git commit -a -c .git/rebase-apply/original-commit" followed by "git
rebase --skip" is a workaround that is too ugly to be called "workable"
for it.  Perhaps "git rebase --edit --continue" or something?