RFC: Renaming "git rebase --onto"

During a few years of discussing git operations with colleagues, I’ve found the “git rebase --onto” operation particularly ambiguous. The reason is that I always describe a rebase operation as “onto” something else (because of the English phrase “A is based on B”). For example: 

$ git rebase new-base  # “Rebase HEAD onto new-base (from merge-base of HEAD and new-base)"
$ git rebase new-base my-branch  # “Rebase my-branch onto new-base (from merge-base of my-branch and new-base)”

Personally, I understand “git-rebase --onto new-base old-base” as meaning “rebase from old-base to new-base”. Some prepositions that might make this clearer:

$ git rebase --from old-base new-base  # “Rebase HEAD onto new-base, from old-base"
$ git rebase --after old-base new-base  # “Rebase commits on HEAD after old-base HEAD onto new-base"
$ git rebase --excluding old-base new-base  # “Rebase HEAD onto new-base, excluding commit old-base (and its parents)"

In all cases this would change the order of the arguments compared to --onto, making it more consistent with the  no-option rebase.

What do others think? Is my view of “onto” common or unusual?



Jonathon Mah
me@JonathonMah.com