Rebase Question

Rebase Question

[Andrew Ottaviano]

Hello all! 
 
I’ve used git for a few years now and I
think it is an amazing tool! Thank you for your hard work in
developing/maintaining it! I really appreciate it! 
 
I have a question. Let’s say that my
colleague and I branch off of master and are working. Let’s say I’m 5 commits
ahead of master and my colleague merges in ahead of me. The logical thing in my
mind is to rebase off of master. 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 could squash, but then I loose branch
history, so I don’t really want to do that. I could rebase in interactive mode,
but if I recall, I still need to resolve all the conflicts on every commit
before it squashes. 
 
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. If that doesn’t work (or I guess it might be the same
as a merge of master into my branch), then couldn’t git at least store the
conflict resolution? 
 
Maybe I’m silly for asking this question,
I just really like rebase because it is so clean and this is my one frustration
with this method. 


Thanks for humoring me 😊 
Andrew Ottaviano 

Re: Rebase Question

[Jacob Keller]

On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 5:08 PM Andrew Ottaviano <andrew_o1995@live.com> wrote:
>
> Hello all!
>
> I’ve used git for a few years now and I
> think it is an amazing tool! Thank you for your hard work in
> developing/maintaining it! I really appreciate it!
>
> I have a question. Let’s say that my
> colleague and I branch off of master and are working. Let’s say I’m 5 commits
> ahead of master and my colleague merges in ahead of me. The logical thing in my
> mind is to rebase off of master. 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 could squash, but then I loose branch
> history, so I don’t really want to do that. I could rebase in interactive mode,
> but if I recall, I still need to resolve all the conflicts on every commit
> before it squashes.
>
> 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. If that doesn’t work (or I guess it might be the same
> as a merge of master into my branch), then couldn’t git at least store the
> conflict resolution?

You might try looking at git imerge for this
https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge

It resolves conflicts by doing incremental merges, and then you can
have an option to produce the end result of a merge or a rebase.

>
> Maybe I’m silly for asking this question,
> I just really like rebase because it is so clean and this is my one frustration
> with this method.
>

It's definitely a potential frustration that can occur during large
rebases like this.

Thanks,
Jake

>
> Thanks for humoring me
> Andrew Ottaviano

Re: Rebase Question

[Bryan Turner]

On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 5:07 PM Andrew Ottaviano <andrew_o1995@live.com> wrote:
>
> Hello all!
>
> I’ve used git for a few years now and I
> think it is an amazing tool! Thank you for your hard work in
> developing/maintaining it! I really appreciate it!
>
> I have a question. Let’s say that my
> colleague and I branch off of master and are working. Let’s say I’m 5 commits
> ahead of master and my colleague merges in ahead of me. The logical thing in my
> mind is to rebase off of master. 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 could squash, but then I loose branch
> history, so I don’t really want to do that. I could rebase in interactive mode,
> but if I recall, I still need to resolve all the conflicts on every commit
> before it squashes.

Have you investigated git rerere[1] at all? Documentation indicates it
works for rebase as well as merge, so it might be possible to train
that to resolve the conflicts.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rerere

(Pardon the re-send; Gmail being trash.)

Re: Rebase Question

[Jeff King]

On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 05:29:03PM -0700, Bryan Turner wrote:

> On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 5:07 PM Andrew Ottaviano <andrew_o1995@live.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello all!
> >
> > I’ve used git for a few years now and I
> > think it is an amazing tool! Thank you for your hard work in
> > developing/maintaining it! I really appreciate it!
> >
> > I have a question. Let’s say that my
> > colleague and I branch off of master and are working. Let’s say I’m 5 commits
> > ahead of master and my colleague merges in ahead of me. The logical thing in my
> > mind is to rebase off of master. 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 could squash, but then I loose branch
> > history, so I don’t really want to do that. I could rebase in interactive mode,
> > but if I recall, I still need to resolve all the conflicts on every commit
> > before it squashes.
> 
> Have you investigated git rerere[1] at all? Documentation indicates it
> works for rebase as well as merge, so it might be possible to train
> that to resolve the conflicts.

I don't think rerere helps here. In a rebase like this, the problem is
that it _isn't_ the same conflict.

Imagine a case like this:

-- >8 --
git init repo
cd repo

# both branches start with just the line "base"
echo base >file
git add file
git commit -m base

# one side adds a new line
git checkout -b newline
echo another >>file
git commit -am 'add a line'

# and the other modifies the first line
git checkout -b other HEAD^
echo one >file
git commit -am one
echo two >file
git commit -am two

# and now we rebase on top of the newline branch
git rebase newline
-- >8 --

Applying the first commit gets this conflict (in diff3 form)

  <<<<<<< ours
  base
  another
  ||||||| base
  base
  =======
  one
  >>>>>>> theirs

After we fix that up to "one\nanother", the second conflict is:

  <<<<<<< ours
  one
  another
  ||||||| base
  one
  =======
  two
  >>>>>>> theirs

Likewise, even if you had done the original merge between branch tips,
you'd have seen yet another conflict:

  <<<<<<< ours
  two
  ||||||| base
  base
  =======
  base
  another
  >>>>>>> theirs

The actual lines changed are the same, but as the nearby context is
continually shifting, we don't consider these to be the "same" conflict.

-Peff

Re: Rebase Question

[Junio C Hamano]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> I don't think rerere helps here. In a rebase like this, the problem is
> that it _isn't_ the same conflict.
>
> Imagine a case like this:
> ...
> Applying the first commit gets this conflict (in diff3 form)
>
>   <<<<<<< ours
>   base
>   another
>   ||||||| base
>   base
>   =======
>   one
>   >>>>>>> theirs
>
> After we fix that up to "one\nanother", the second conflict is:
>
>   <<<<<<< ours
>   one
>   another
>   ||||||| base
>   one
>   =======
>   two
>   >>>>>>> theirs
>
> Likewise, even if you had done the original merge between branch tips,
> you'd have seen yet another conflict:
>
>   <<<<<<< ours
>   two
>   ||||||| base
>   base
>   =======
>   base
>   another
>   >>>>>>> theirs
>
> The actual lines changed are the same, but as the nearby context is
> continually shifting, we don't consider these to be the "same" conflict.

Correct.  The conflict you see at each step may be trivial to
resolve, but would not "replay" at all, exactly because they are not
the same conflicts.  Knowing that the user would resolve

    base --> base/another
        \                \
         ---> one--------- one/another

does not help us to decide that

    base --> two -----------
        \                   \
         ---> base/another---???

is resolved to two/another.

RE: Rebase Question

[Felipe Contreras]

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

rebase question

[Ryan Sun]

I want to rebase the current branch B1 from origin/A1 to origin/A2
so I want to use this command
git --onto origin/A2 origin/A1 B1

Q1: is this command right? (A2 is based on A1, current branch is B1,
B1 is already pushed to origin, a remote repo, and I think I will
force push B1 after rebase)

but I accidentally typed
 git --onto origin/A2 origin/A1 origin/A2
and git says
----
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Fast-forwarded origin/base to origin/base.
----

Q2:I assume this command is safe and it didn't change anything right?

THANKS IN ADVANCE

Re: rebase question

[Martin von Zweigbergk]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2011, Ryan Sun wrote:

> I want to rebase the current branch B1 from origin/A1 to origin/A2
> so I want to use this command
> git --onto origin/A2 origin/A1 B1
> 
> Q1: is this command right? (A2 is based on A1, current branch is B1,
> B1 is already pushed to origin, a remote repo, and I think I will
> force push B1 after rebase)

Yes, it is correct (except that the "rebase" is missing, of
course). Since A2 is based on A1, you could even use "git rebase
origin/A2 B1".

> but I accidentally typed
>  git --onto origin/A2 origin/A1 origin/A2
> and git says
> ----
> First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
> Fast-forwarded origin/base to origin/base.
> ----

I assume "origin/base" is what you called "origin/A2" above. The
output is a bit confusing in this case.

I tried "git rebase [--onto origin/pu] origin/pu origin/master". That
printed

Fast-forwarded origin/master to origin/pu.

which is even incorrect. It didn't (and shouldn't) update
origin/master, so it obviously shouldn't say that it did
either. Should be easy enough to fix. I will have a look at that when
I get some time.

> Q2:I assume this command is safe and it didn't change anything right?

It detached your HEAD at origin/A2, but no commits, nor refs would
have been changed or lost. You can safely checkout out B1 again if you
want.


/Martin