Re: [BUG] Cannot push some grafted branches

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

I do not understand why you even want to go in the harder route in
the first place, only to complicate things?

All you want to do is to craft a commit object that records a
specific tree shape, has a set of parents you want, and has the log
information you want.  Once you have the commit, you can replace an
unwanted commit with it.

[...]

    $ git checkout X^0 ;# detach
    $ git reset --soft A
    $ git commit -C X

[...]

Is this not intuitive enough?

I still wouldn't recommend this approach in git-replace(1) for several
reasons:

* It does not generalize in any direction.  For each field you may want
  to change, you have to know a _specific_ way of getting just the
  commit you want.

* More to the point of replacing the parent lists, while the above might
  be expected of a slightly advanced git user, you get into deep magic
  the second you want to fake a merge commit with an arbitrary
  combination of parents.  (No, you don't need to tell me how.  I'm just
  saying that fooling with either MERGE_HEAD or read-tree is not for
  mere mortals.)

* The above potentially introduces clock skew into the repository, which
  can trigger bugs (like rev-list accidentally missing out on some side
  arm!) until we get around to implementing and using generation
  numbers.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch