Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] builtin/history: introduce "fixup" subcommand

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:55:00 +0200

On Wed, Apr 22, 2026 at 03:06:12PM -0400, D. Ben Knoble wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2026 at 6:30 AM Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > diff --git a/Documentation/git-history.adoc b/Documentation/git-history.adoc
> > index 24dc907033..3cdfc8ba02 100644
> > --- a/Documentation/git-history.adoc
> > +++ b/Documentation/git-history.adoc
> > @@ -53,6 +55,19 @@ COMMANDS
> >
> >  The following commands are available to rewrite history in different ways:
> >
> > +`fixup <commit>`::
> > +       Apply the currently staged changes to the specified commit. The staged
> > +       changes are incorporated into the target commit's tree via a three-way
> > +       merge, using HEAD's tree as the merge base, which is equivalent to
> > +       linkgit:git-cherry-pick[1].
> 
> I'm not quite sure what, as a user of "git history fixup," I'm
> supposed to take from this. Does it make conflicts less likely when
> creating the new fixup? I imagine it doesn't help with conflicts
> between <commit> and HEAD that newly arise.
> 
> Anyway, I'd think the mechanics are less relevant than the end-user
> behavior at this point in the doc, unless the equivalence with
> cherry-pick is supposed to tell me something about that behavior.

There's at least two more or less obvious variants to do this:

  - You generate the diff between HEAD and index and then try to reapply
    the patch on top of the target commit.

  - You perform the three-way merge.

The second item is definitely more robust compared to generating the
diff and reapplying it, and we use the exact same strategy to perform
cherry-picks nowadays.

> > diff --git a/builtin/history.c b/builtin/history.c
> > index 549e352c74..6299f0dfa9 100644
> > --- a/builtin/history.c
> > +++ b/builtin/history.c
[snip]
> > +       /*
> > +        * Perform the three-way merge to reapply changes in the index onto the
> > +        * target commit. This is using basically the same logic as a
> > +        * cherry-pick, where the base commit is our HEAD, ours is the original
> > +        * tree and theirs is the index tree.
> > +        */
> 
> OTOH, this explanation helps quite a bit here :)

Hm, okay. I felt that this explanation here is even more technical. How
about:

    `fixup <commit>`::
        Apply the currently staged changes to the specified commit. This
        is done by performing a three-way merge between the HEAD commit,
        the target commit and the tree generated from staged changes.
        This is using the same logic as linkgit:git-cherry-pick[1].

Not sure that this is an improvement? Happy to hear other suggestions.

Thanks!

Patrick