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

From: Sergey Organov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 08:41:31 +0300

Johannes Schindelin <[email-masked]> writes:
[...]
> Just to give you one concrete example: when I recently rebased some
> patches (no reording or dropping involved here!) and one of the picks
> failed with merge conflicts, I realized that that particular commit
> introduced incorrect formatting and fixed that right away (verifying that
> no other commits introduced incorrect formatting, of course).
>
> With your new cute idea to magically cherry-pick -m1, this change would
> have been magically dropped from the subsequent merge commits!

You put it as if the problem you describe is unsolvable short of getting
back to your favorite blind re-merge. Do you really believe it?

I thought it's obvious that I originally meant "cherry-pick -m1" to be
an explanation facility, a proof of concept, not the final answer to all
the problems of history editing. It's a nice base for actually
approaching these problems though, unlike blind re-merge currently being
used, the latter having no potential.

The fact that bare naked "cherry-pick -m1" doesn't do what is often[1]
required in such cases neither voids the general idea of reproducing
merge-the-result, nor does it make current re-merge approach less
broken.

[1] Please take into consideration that it's _not always_ the case that
one needs a change made to a side-branch to actually propagate to the
main-line over the merge (think "merge -x ours", or something similar
but not that simple), and then it's rather the cute idea to blindly
re-merge that will wreak havoc, as in a lot of other cases.

-- Sergey