git's ability to handle empty commits is somewhat lacking, especially when
preforming a rebase. Nominally empty commits are undesireable entries, the
result of commits that are made empty by prior commits covering the same changs.
But occasionally, empty commits are useful to developers (e.g. inserting notes
into the development history without changing any code along the way). In these
cases its desireable to easily preserve empty commits during operations like
rebases.
This patch series enhances git to do just that. It adds two options to the
git-cherry-pick command, --allow-empty, which allows git cherry-pick to preserve
an empty commit, even if the fast forward logic isn't applicable during the
operation, and --keep-redundant-commits, which allows the user to also keep
commits that were made empty via conflict resolution. It also enhances
git-rebase to add a --keep-empty option which enables rebases to preserve empty
commits.
I've tested these operations out myself here and they work well for me
Signed-off-by: Neil Horman <nhorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
Change notes:
Based on version 1 feedback from this list, the following changes have been made
V2)
* Changed --keep-empty to --allow-empty in the git cherry-pick command
* Converted run_git_commit to use argv_array
* Updated cherry-pick --allow-empty description in man page
* added ignore-if-made-empty option to git-cherry-pick
* Added test to test suite to validate the new cherry-pick options
* Updated git-rebase man page to be less verbose and more accurate in the
description of the keep-empty option
* squashed the addition of the keep-empty flag in git-rebase down to one
commit from 3
* fixed up coding style in git-rebase script
* Optimized detection of empty commits
* Only augmented git-rebase-editor message if empty commits are
possible
V3)
* reversed the --ignore-if-empty-logic to by default only keep initially
empty commits
* replaced --ignore-if-empty with --keep-redundant-commits, to allow
empty commits that are made empty via conflict resolution, in addition
to commits that were created as empty
* reworked is_original_commit_empty to be more efficient and portable
* Misc sylistic and spelling cleanups
V4)
* Reverted the cherry-pick advice changes in V3 based on in-thread
discussion
* Rewrote my changes to is_original_commit_empty and run_git_commit to
not have to fork, making them more efficient.
v5)
* Additional help text clean up
* Additional error checking added to run_git_commit code
* Whitespace cleanup
* Removed needed cache_tree freeing
* Test case cleanup
* Fixed regression in t3404 and t3416 - this turned out to be
a problem with the note that git rebase -i adds at the bottom
of the rebase text. It was inadvertently indented and caused the
test fake editor to misread the commit template. The indentation
has been corrected, and these two tests, as well as all the other
expected tests pass now
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