Re: [PATCH 5/8] rebase: introduce the --recreate-merges option

Øyvind Rønningstad [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

So no, I do not think that --recreate-merges --first-parent is a good

idea

quoted

at all. Unless you try to do that non-interactively only, *and

disallow it

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in interactive mode*.

Correct.  If the original side branch has commits A, B and C, you
are rebuilding the topic to have only A and C but not B and then
recreate the merge of that rebuilt topic, then you absolutely do not
want "cherry-pick -m1" of the original merge when recreating the
merge, as that would resurrect the effect of having B.  The same
argument applies if you rebuilt the topic with A and C and then a
new commit D.  "cherry-pick -m1" of the original would do a wrong
thing.

When there is no such fixing up, "cherry-pick -m1" is the right
thing to do, though, so it probably makes sense to pick merges that
way when the side topic being merged consists of the same commits as
the original.  I do not think that the code structure in the topic
as posted makes it impossible (or unnecessarily hard) to give an
enhancement like that in the future as a follow-up series.