Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/3] rebase: accept -<number> as another way of saying HEAD~<number>

From: Matthieu Moy <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 23:39:11 +0100

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:

> Matthieu Moy <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Michael Haggerty <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>>> Or perhaps "-NUM" should fail with an error message if any of the last
>>> NUM commits are merges.  In that restricted scenario (which probably
>>> accounts for 99% of rebases), "-NUM" is equivalent to "HEAD~NUM".
>>
>> Makes sense to me. So, -NUM would actually mean "rebase the last NUM
>> commits" (as well as being an alias for HEAD~NUM), but would fail when
>> it does not make sense (with an error message explaining the situation
>> and pointing the user to HEAD~N if this is what he wanted).
>>
>> This would actually be a feature for me: I often want to rebase "recent
>> enough" history, and when my @{upstream} isn't well positionned,...
>
> Could you elaborate on this a bit?  What does "isn't well
> positioned" mean?

The most common case is when @{upstream} is not positionned at all,
because I'm on a temporary branch on which I did not configure it. The
other case is when I did a manual merge of a branch other than upstream.

As I said in another message, there would probably be cleaner solutions,
but the trial and error one does not work that bad.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/