Re: [RFC] Rebasing merges: a jorney to the ultimate solution(RoadClear)

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

Hi Buga,

On Tue, 6 Mar 2018, Igor Djordjevic wrote:

> On 06/03/2018 19:12, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > 
> > > > And I guess being consistent is pretty important, too - if you add new
> > > > content during merge rebase, it should always show up in the merge,
> > > > period. 
> > >
> > > Yes, that should make it easy for the user to know what to expect from
> > > rebase.
> > 
> > [...]
> > 
> > It will be slightly inconsistent. But in a defendable way, I think.
> 
> I like where this discussion is heading, and here`s what I thought 
> about it :)
> 
> [...]
> 
> Here`s a twist - not letting `merge` trying to be too smart by 
> figuring out whether passed arguments correspond to rewritten 
> versions of the original merge parents (which would be too 
> restrictive, too, I`m afraid), but just be explicit about it, instead!

That's the missing piece, I think.

> So, it could be something like:
> 
> 	merge -C deadbee 123abc:cafecafe 234bcd:bedbedbed

I like where this is heading, too, but I do not think that we can do this
on a per-MERGE_HEAD basis. The vast majority of merge commits, in
practice, have two parents. So the `merge` command would actually only
have one revision to merge (because HEAD is the implicit first parent). So
that is easy.

But as soon as you go octopus, you can either perform an octopus merge, or
rebase the original merge commit. You cannot really mix and match here.

Unless we reimplement the octopus merge (which works quite a bit
differently from the "rebase merge commit" strategy, even if it is
incremental, too), which has its own challenges: if there are merge
conflicts before merging the last MERGE_HEAD, the octopus merge will exit
with status 2, telling you "Should not be doing an octopus.". While we
will want to keep merge conflict markers and continue with the "rebase the
original merge commit" strategy.

And it would slam the door shut for adding support for *other* merge
strategies to perform a more-than-two-parents merge.

Also, I do not think that it makes a whole lot of sense in practice to let
users edit what will be used for "original parent". If the user wants to
do complicated stuff, they can already do that, via `exec`. The `merge`
command really should be about facilitating common workflows, guiding the
user to what is sane.

Currently my favorite idea is to introduce a new flag: -R (for "rebase the
original merge commit"). It would look like this:

	merge -R -C <original-merge> <merge-head> # <oneline>

This flag would of course trigger the consistency check (does the number
of parents of the original merge commit agree with the parameter list? Was
an original merge commit specified to begin with?), and it would not fall
back to the recursive merge, but error out if that check failed.

Side note: I wonder whether we really need to perform the additional check
that ensures that the <merge-head> refers to the rewritten version of the
original merge commit's parent.

Second side note: if we can fast-forward, currently we prefer that, and I
think we should keep that behavior with -R, too.

If the user wants to force a new merge, they simply remove that -R flag.

What do you think?

Ciao,
Dscho