Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 3/3] rebase: add a config option for --rebase-merges

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2023 12:46:27 -0700

Alex Henrie <[email-masked]> writes:

> What I really don't want is to paint ourselves into a corner. You're
> right that it's unlikely that the default will ever change from
> no-rebase-cousins to rebase-cousins; I was mistaken. However, Glen
> thinks that in the future we might have some kind of
> rebase-evil-merges mode as well, and that that might become the
> default. If we don't let the rebase.rebaseMerges config value control
> the default behavior of --rebase-merges without an argument on the
> command line, we would have to introduce a separate config option for
> the transition, which would be ugly.
>
> More voices would be helpful here. Does anyone else have an opinion on
> how likely it is that the default rebase-merges mode will change in
> the future? Or on whether rebase.rebaseMerges should be allowed to
> affect --rebase-merges in order to facilitate such a change?

Any such "opinion" about the future, or the belief that we can
somehow predict one, would be wrong anyway.  So I am not sure
soliciting more voices to look into crystal balls would help all
that much.  Having said that...

The default rebase-merges behaviour may be improved, but changing it
in a totally backward incompatible way _without_ a carefully prepared
transition strategy will be very unlikely, simply because existing
end users would not allow us to.  I do not offhand know if the
configuration variable(s) you propose would serve as a good mechanism
to help such transition.

Thanks.