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 v6) * synced keeep-redundant-commits option and variable name * fixed up some comment terminology * minor newline cleanup * Removed some unneeded braces from test code * minor syntatic cleanup in rebase scripts * Refactored empty index checking to make run_git_commit more readable I was also going to change the logic so that it operated more like git cherry-pick did before the patchset, but Junio's comments made me think the new logic was preferable. v7) * Fixed up forgotten comment_out changes requested in git-rebase--interactive * Made changelog comment for keep-redundant-commits patch more verbose so that it was clear that default behavior was changing * further refinement of detection of redundant commits, making do_pick_commit and run_git_commit more readable -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html