Re: Rebasing evil merges with --rebase-merges

Igor Djordjevic [off-list ref] writes:

On 15/01/2020 19:14, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Having said that, if you ever find yourself wanting Just One Feature 
in `--rebase-merges` that would make it worthwhile for you to think 
about switching your patch-based workflow to a `rebase -ir`-based 
one, please let me know, and I will try my best to accommodate.

Another thing I noticed was that we may want to attempt to recreate
an evil merge and then stop to ask confirmation.  The "rebase -ri" I
did to sanity-check my revert for example failed to bring in the
change made in the existing evil merge when trying to recreate the
merge of the dl/merge-autostash topic into master..pu chain and
silently created a fails-to-build-from-the-source tree instead.

FYI (and anyone interested), it`s something we actually brought up 
some two years ago, at the time of introducing `--rebase-merges` 
(known as `--recreate-merges` back at the time), see[1].

It ended being a lengthy and heated discussion (inside a few 
different topics as well, like original RFC[2] and it`s v2 update[3]), 
myself being guilty for dropping out eventually and not following it 
through, though, life taking me in another direction at the moment...

For reference, there is a nice summary in "Git Rev News Edition 38":

https://git.github.io/rev_news/2018/04/18/edition-38

but I still find this functionality to be very useful, not to say 
essential, even, for reliable complex merge _rebasing_ (meaning 
keeping "evil merge" changes, too), and not just merge _recreating_ 
(loosing "evil merge" changes, and worse - doing it silently, as you 
experienced yourself now as well).

Yeah, dropping user content silently and by default is still the most
weird thing for git to do, be it a merge or not a merge.

As an additional note, I came to conclusion that there is actually no
such thing as "evil merge" that is somehow different from "evil commit"
in general (a commit containing unrelated changes).

Then, as "evil commit" belongs to user domain, we need to finally
realize that "evil merge" belongs entirely to user domain as well, and
thus, as it's out of git domain, we should stop using the term "evil
merge" to excuse any kinds of weird git behaviors.

Regards,
Sergey