Re: [PATCH RFC 1/2] builtin/history: abort reword on unchanged message

El lun, 8 jun 2026 a las 18:44, Ben Knoble ([off-list ref]) escribió:

quoted

Le 8 juin 2026 à 08:23, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] a écrit :

[snip]

quoted

Having said that, I personally think that the current behaviour of
`commit --amend` and `history reword` are both _wrong_ [*2*].

You may start `git commit --amend`, and after staring at the
existing commit log message for some time in your editor, it is
quite natural for you to decide that leaving the commit as-is is the
right thing [*3*] in your situation.  It may have been a better
design for the system to notice this situation and leave the commit
as-is, with an override option `--force` to allow users to forcibly
update the committer ident and timestamp in the commit header.  I am
not a `history reword` user (yet), but from the motivation you
described for this patch, I sense that the story is the same there.

FWIW, in this situation I abort my editor (:cquit in Vim) so that the amend gets an error-valued exit code from the subprocess and aborts itself.

Perhaps there could/should be a better side-channel for communicating that, though? I do not know how easy it is to tell other editors to « quit with errors ».

Well, I didn't know that I could exit with errors (:cq in NeoVim),
can't say much about other editors, but It would be better to abort if
the messages are the same and forget about editors.

quoted

[Footnote]

*1* Besides, doesn't "--update-refs" in "rebase -i" allow you to
    adjust the branches?

*2* But it is an established behaviour people _rely_ on, so even
    though it may have been better if these commands behaved
    differently, it probably is a bit too late to change it now.

*3* This includes the case where the original author is especially
    difficult to work with and would complain any change to their
    commits, even if the only change you made for them is a
    typofix.  Fixing a small typo/grammo may not be worth your time
    and unpleasant exchanges with them after touching their commit.

Thanks,
Pablo