Re: [RFC/PATCH] rebase -i: add run command to launch a shell command

Matthieu Moy [off-list ref] writes:

That's a good question. My original patch was running the command from
the toplevel, which is the natural way to implement it. I've changed
my mind to execute the command from the place where "git rebase -i"
was started (which means this has to be memorized in a temporary file
to be persistant accross "git rebase --continue"). I think this makes
more sense for the user, and I've actually already been biten by the
old behavior, running "rebase -i" from a doc/ subdirectory, and
wondering why my "exec make" was rebuilding the code itself.

This comes with at least one drawback: if directory from which the
rebase was started didn't exist in the past, then we can't do a simple
"cd" to it. My implementation re-creates the directory temporarily, so
that the command can run, and cleans it up afterwards. The only really
problematic case is when the directory can not be created (like
directory/file conflict). It this case, the command is not ran, and
the script exits.

Sorry to join the discussion after you have already coded it, but I don't
think running the external command at a random subdirectory that the
operation happened to have started makes much sense, as rebase is a
tree-wide operation.  The user if s/he so chooses can chdir down (if the
directory still exists in the revision in question) in the script, but I
think the built-in behaviour should be to just run it from the toplevel.