Re: [PATCH] rebase: add --forget to cleanup rebase, leave HEAD untouched

Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy  [off-list ref] writes:

There are occasions when you decide to abort an in-progress rebase and
move on to do something else but you forget to do "git rebase --abort"
first. Or the rebase has been in progress for so long you forgot about
it. By the time you realize that (e.g. by starting another rebase)
it's already too late to retrace your steps. The solution is normally

    rm -r .git/<some rebase dir>

and continue with your life. But there could be two different
directories for <some rebase dir> (and it obviously requires some
knowledge of how rebase works), and the ".git" part could be much
longer if you are not at top-dir, or in a linked worktree. And
"rm -r" is very dangerous to do in .git, a mistake in there could
destroy object database or other important data.

Provide "git rebase --forget" for this exact use case.

Two and a half comments.

 - The title says "leave HEAD untouched".  Are my working tree files
   and my index also safe from this operation, or is HEAD the only
   thing that is protected?

 - I think I saw a variant of this gotcha for an unconcluded
   cherry-pick that was left behind, which the bash-prompt script
   did not notice but the next "git cherry-pick" did by complaining
   "you are in the middle" or something like that.  Perhaps we would
   want to have a similarly sounding option to help that case, too,
   not in this patch but as another patch on the same theme?

 - Would it have helped if bash-prompt were in use?  I am not saying
   that this patch becomes unnecessary if you use it; I am trying to
   see if it helps its users by reminding them what state they are
   in.