Re: Feature request: rebase -i inside of rebase -i

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

Hi George,

On Tue, 31 Mar 2020, George Spelvin wrote:

> Thinking about Philip Oakley's suggestion, it dawned on me that
> we can *already* do a nested rebase manually, and having a less
> manual alias for the procedure would be reasonable.
>
> Suppose the last four commits are O-A-B-C, and whether they were created
> by this rebase or existed before is irrelevant.
>
> If I want to rebase --nested -i O, then I --edit-todo and
> prepend the following four lines:
> reset O
> pick A
> pick B
> pick C
>
> If a nested rebase command does just that, I think it would cover my
> use case.  If it adds a comment saying "nested rebase ends here",
> it's easy to cancel the nested rebase if there was a mistake.

FWIW this is precisely what I do in
https://github.com/git-for-windows/build-extra/blob/70d940d1b/ever-green.sh#L184-L246

I create a new worktree (without checking out anything), start a rebase
with a custom (fake) editor that simply grabs the todo list and aborts
that rebase. Then I remove that worktree and insert the grabbed todo list
into the current one.

However, I find that it is not at all easy to cancel the nested rebase
because the current `HEAD` is recorded _nowhere_.

Ciao,
Dscho

> A slightly fancier thing a nestrd rebase could do is see if any of the
> newly created picks are also used in merges that were already in the todo
> list.  In that case, follow the pick by a label command and update the
> later merge to refer to the label.
>