On 2023-10-24 17:19, Johannes Sixt wrote:

Am 24.10.23 um 19:30 schrieb Junio C Hamano:

quoted

Phillip Wood [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

"fixup -c/-C" were conceived as a way to reword a commit message at
the same time as optionally fixing up the commit's content.

Yup, it still is a "fix", meaning the identity and the spirit of the
commit being fixed are unchanged.

That's a pitty, because that is not at all what *I* use "fixup -C" for.
To update the commit message, I use "squash" (or occasionally "reword").
I use "fixup -C" after the following events:

1. Commit unfinished changes for whatever reason. Usually the commit
message just says "WIP <topic>" because that's what it is.
2. Make a fixup commit for an earlier commit because doing the fixup now
gets it out of the way, and often delaying it until after the completed
change would cause merge conflicts.
3. Complete the WIP including the commit message.

I would now use "fixup -C" on commit 3, because its metadata reflects
reality more accurately than that of 1. Commit 3 often comes days after 1.

Speaking of the metadata ...

I never use "fixup -C" (or -c), but I do use squash/fixup a lot.  I find 
that I would prefer it if Git used the most recent Author date from the 
set of commits being combined, rather than preserving the picked 
commit's Author date.  Sometimes it takes quite a while for me to get a 
piece of work sorted out, and I would rather have the Author date in the 
end-result commit reflect the work's completion time than its initiation 
time.

The current behaviour means that when scanning through commits with 
tools like gitk (which shows just the Author date in its list of 
commits) I'll often see what I feel are inaccurate or confusing dates 
there, and I use the Committer date (a bit less convenient in gitk) to 
figure out when the work was actually "done".  (Although the span 
between the Author date from the start of the work and the Committer 
date from the end of the work would roughly reflect how long the work 
took to complete, I don't use Git for that kind of information.)

Anyway, this is a minor itch for me that I've never felt the need to 
scratch.  I just thought I'd mention it since the topic is being discussed.

		M.