Subject: Re: Bug: being stuck in rebase mode when accidently typing `git am`

From: Phillip Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2025 20:13:30 +0100

On 11/04/2025 19:23, D. Ben Knoble wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2025 at 10:35 AM Ludo Pulles <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>
>> Thank you for filling out a Git bug report!
>> Please answer the following questions to help us understand your issue.
>>
>> What did you do before the bug happened? (Steps to reproduce your issue)
>>
>> 1. Run `git init` in an empty directory, and commit once.
>> 2. Run `git am` and press Ctrl-C.
> 
> Doesn't `git am` print a warning about how it's reading from stdin?
> Pressing C-d at this point to send EOF just exits "normally."

Indeed

>> 3. Run `git status`. It will say: 'You are currently rebasing. (all
>> conflicts fixed: run "git rebase --continue")'.
> 
> Yes, this is odd: my shell prompt (using the contrib script) says
> "AM/REBASE", so I know better: git am --abort does the trick.
> 
> This seems like a failure of git-status more than anything; I wonder
> if there's some difference in how the prompt script checks for
> in-progress am vs. how git-status does it?

I think the issue is that "git am" does not write the 
".git/rebase-apply/applying" which "git status" uses to distinguish 
between "git am" and "git rebase" until it has read the patch files. We 
could instead check for ".git/rebase-apply/rebased-patches" which is 
written by "git rebase" but that file gets deleted when "git am" exits 
for the user to fix merge conflicts. I think the best solution is to 
move where "git am" writes ".git/rebase-apply/applying" so it gets 
created before the patch files are read - see the diff below.

Best Wishes

Phillip

[Apologies for the line wrapping the thunderbird plugin I was using to 
disable that has stopped working in recent versions]
---- >8 ----

diff --git a/builtin/am.c b/builtin/am.c
index 3b61bd4c333..e884ac39b23 100644
--- a/builtin/am.c
+++ b/builtin/am.c
@@ -1006,6 +1006,11 @@
          refs_delete_ref(get_main_ref_store(the_repository), NULL,
                          "REBASE_HEAD", NULL, REF_NO_DEREF);

+        if (state->rebasing)
+                write_state_text(state, "rebasing", "");
+        else
+                write_state_text(state, "applying", "");
+
          if (split_mail(state, patch_format, paths, keep_cr) < 0) {
                  am_destroy(state);
                  die(_("Failed to split patches."));
@@ -1076,11 +1081,6 @@
          sq_quote_argv(&sb, state->git_apply_opts.v);
          write_state_text(state, "apply-opt", sb.buf);

-        if (state->rebasing)
-                write_state_text(state, "rebasing", "");
-        else
-                write_state_text(state, "applying", "");
-
          if (!repo_get_oid(the_repository, "HEAD", &curr_head)) {
                  write_state_text(state, "abort-safety", 
oid_to_hex(&curr_head));
                  if (!state->rebasing)