Re: [PATCH 4/4] Add git-rewrite-commits

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, Sven Verdoolaege wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 05:37:22PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > That is to be expected.  After all, the first is a script.  However, I 
> > really have ask: how often per hour do you want to run that program?
> 
> I have a project that needs some cleaning-up and I'd like to do it 
> incrementally.  I think I'll have to run it about a dozen times.

A dozen times seems not that bad, especially since you can run both 
programs on a limited set of commits.  So the cost is not that big.

> > I am really unhappy that so much is talked about filtering out 
> > commits.  That is amost certainly not what you want in most cases.  
> > In particular, I suspect that most users would expect the _changes_ 
> > filtered out by such a command, which is just not true.
> 
> I don't care about that either.  I'm just mentioning it because it's 
> mentioned in the git-filter-branch documentation (which you added).

Which I copied.  And this is not the first, let alone the only example in 
filter-branch's documentation.

> > The second is to rewrite the commit messages so that the hashes are 
> > mapped, too.  But that should be relatively easy, too: you can provide 
> > a message filter, and you can use the provided "map" function.  If 
> > this seems to be what many people need, you can write a simple 
> > function and put it into filter-branch for common use.
> 
> It's not going to be me (as I sais, I don't like shell programming).

Yes, you made that clear.

However, this leaves things only in half-finished states.

- "git filter-branch" did not learn the useful features that you seem to 
  need, and

- your builtin is at most a start of a builtin replacement for 
  filter-branch, which changes the semantics, to be sure.

I have no doubts that it will stay that way for a while, since this 
builtin seems to be good enough for what you want it to do.

Ciao,
Dscho