Re: [PATCH] Re: rebase -i: auto-squash commits

On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 04:29 -0400, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Hi,

On Thu, 18 Jun 2009, Teemu Likonen wrote:

quoted

On 2009-06-18 10:06 (+0200), Johannes Schindelin wrote:

quoted

I'd really rather stay with "fixup". And as I use single-letter
commands quite often, I'd also rather stay away from that magic "!".
And by "magic" I really mean that: people will not find that magic
intuitive at all.

I don't know about people but I do find "!" intuitive. It is squash
after all so I like the idea of using small modifier character.

Mhm.

So let's just interpret the "!" in the most common meaning, namely to add 
an imperative.  Then it means "yes, I do want to squash".  Not 
"squash, but oh, BTW, I want to lose the second commit message 
completely, and I do not want to edit the commit message either".

Really, I do not see how anybody could find this intuitive at all.  Maybe 
after reading the manual, but kinda defeats the meaning of the word 
"intuitive".

The imperative is actually the reason I picked that modifier, as in
"yes, I /really/ do want to squash. Don't ask me, just do it!" Something
akin to -f. I think it makes sense here, but not in the case someone
else mentioned of a commit message only edit. ("recommit" for that
case?) 

In any case, I think this non-interactive squash is orthagonal to being
able to automatically rearrange the commits by "squash to ...". I think
that's a cool idea, but I know that I often don't remember the text of
the commit I want to squash into. So in my case I prefer rearranging
manually and squashing non-interactively. If I planned ahead, I could
pick a prefix for each "class" of commit, and then "squash to prefix",
but I'd want to be able to edit the original commit to remove the
prefix. Sure, I could look at the log, but if I'm just writing a
nonsense message to remind myself where to squash to, I think it would
get in the way of my flow.