Re: [PATCH 0/6] rebase: command "ref" and options --rewrite-{refs,heads,tags}

Hi Greg!

Greg Price writes:

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 06:47:58AM -0400, Greg Price wrote:

quoted

I agree with your footnote -- the more general case will require a
more powerful sequencer to support properly.  And now I see that
Ramkumar Ramachandra is making progress on such a thing right now!
That's great news -- this is a project that has been attempted at
least four times, by five people (including me), in the last three
years.  I hope to see this round make it in -- I was actually thinking
about returning to the problem after seeing this series through, but I
would be glad to see Ram beat me to it.

You're more than welcome to join in -- all the work is public :)
The latest iteration of the sequencer is in 'pu', and I'm currently
busy rolling out a nicer version.

Hmm, on further reading I'm not sure the sequencer Ram aims to build
this summer actually extends to the "mark" and "reset" commands (or
the concepts of "the rewritten <commit>" and "detach" in the
pseudo-TODO notation of your footnote) that would be required to
implement this broader rewrite-side-branches feature.  It looks like
the focus may be on taking the existing features of rebase and
bringing them into C.

Yes, you're absolutely right.  Bringing the existing features to C is
quite a challenging task in itself, and is bound to keep me busy for
the rest of the summer.  I don't plan to implement the features your
series introduces yet, but it's certainly a great long-term goal -- I
think the current series has all the right ingredients;  it just
requires a lot of work before it can start providing more features.

This sounds great too -- it should make rebase a lot faster -- but it
will leave open the pet project I've thought about returning to, of
making "rebase -i -p" work correctly even when the user wants to
rearrange the commits rather than just s/pick/edit/ etc.  That will
require implementing a richer sequencer very like the one required for
a general rewrite-side-branches feature.

Right.  Since all this will take time, it'll probably be a good idea
to get your series merged in now.

-- Ram