Re: RFC: Patch editing

"Shawn O. Pearce" [off-list ref] writes:

Yea - this is a lot like rebase.  I was also thinking that the -m
(merge mode) in rebase probably should be the only option offered.
I don't see why rebase should format-patch|am when we have the
whole commit available and merge-recursive does an excellent job
on tree level merges.

One reason is that it just matches the practice to the mental
model.  Rebasing is like sending yourself a patch series and
applying with 'am' on top of a known commit afresh, which is
exactly what the command without -m does.

The other historical reason is that reconstructing (with -3) the
only part of the tree that matters in the 3-way merge and
running the merge was a lot faster with the merge tool we had,
than a full 3-way merge.