Hi Sergey, On Wed, 7 Mar 2018, Sergey Organov wrote: > Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> writes: > > > On Tue, 6 Mar 2018, Phillip Wood wrote: > > > >> On 03/03/18 00:29, Igor Djordjevic wrote: > >> > > >> > On 02/03/2018 12:31, Phillip Wood wrote: > >> >> > >> >>> Thinking about it overnight, I now suspect that original proposal > >> >>> had a mistake in the final merge step. I think that what you did is > >> >>> a way to fix it, and I want to try to figure what exactly was wrong > >> >>> in the original proposal and to find simpler way of doing it right. > >> >>> > >> >>> The likely solution is to use original UM as a merge-base for final > >> >>> 3-way merge of U1' and U2', but I'm not sure yet. Sounds pretty > >> >>> natural though, as that's exactly UM from which both U1' and U2' > >> >>> have diverged due to rebasing and other history editing. > >> >> > >> >> Hi Sergey, I've been following this discussion from the sidelines, > >> >> though I haven't had time to study all the posts in this thread in > >> >> detail. I wonder if it would be helpful to think of rebasing a merge > >> >> as merging the changes in the parents due to the rebase back into the > >> >> original merge. So for a merge M with parents A B C that are rebased > >> >> to A' B' C' the rebased merge M' would be constructed by (ignoring > >> >> shell quoting issues) > >> >> > >> >> git checkout --detach M > >> >> git merge-recursive A -- M A' > >> >> tree=$(git write-tree) > >> >> git merge-recursive B -- $tree B' > >> >> tree=$(git write-tree) > >> >> git merge-recursive C -- $tree C' > >> >> tree=$(git write-tree) > >> >> M'=$(git log --pretty=%B -1 M | git commit-tree -pA' -pB' -pC') > >> >> > >> >> This should pull in all the changes from the parents while preserving > >> >> any evil conflict resolution in the original merge. It superficially > >> >> reminds me of incremental merging [1] but it's so long since I looked at > >> >> that I'm not sure if there are any significant similarities. > >> >> > >> >> [1] https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge > >> > > >> > Interesting, from quick test[3], this seems to produce the same > >> > result as that other test I previously provided[2], where temporary > >> > commits U1' and U2' are finally merged with original M as a base :) > >> > > >> > Just that this looks like even more straight-forward approach...? > >> > > >> > The only thing I wonder of here is how would we check if the > >> > "rebased" merge M' was "clean", or should we stop for user amendment? > >> > With that other approach Sergey described, we have U1'==U2' to test with. > >> > >> I think (though I haven't rigorously proved to myself) that in the > >> absence of conflicts this scheme has well defined semantics (the merges > >> can be commuted), so the result should be predicable from the users > >> point of view so maybe it could just offer an option to stop. > > > > I am not so sure that the result is independent of the order of the > > merges. In other words, I am not necessarily certain that it is impossible > > to concoct A,A',B,B' commits where merging B'/B before A'/A has a > > different result than merging A'/A before B'/B. > > > > Remember, when constructing counter-examples to hypotheses, those > > counter-examples do not really *have* to make sense on their own. For > > example, A' could introduce *completely different* changes from A, and the > > same is true for B' and B. > > > > I could imagine, for example, that using a ton of consecutive empty lines, > > and using patches that insert something into these empty lines (and are > > thusly inherently ambiguous when said set of empty lines has changed), > > could even introduce a merge conflict in one order, but no conflict in the > > other. > > > > Even so, I think that merging in the order of the parents makes the most > > sense, and that using that strategy makes sense, too, because you really > > have to try hard to make it fail. > > Alternatively, consider to adopt the original approach that has none of > these issues as it uses exactly the same method for rebasing merge > commits that you are already using for rebasing simple commits, not to > mention the advantage of the built-in consistency check. Surely I misunderstand? How can your approach -- which relies *very much* on having the original parent commits -- not *require* that consistency check? What would your approach (that still has no satisfyingly trivial explanation, in my mind) do if somebody edited a `merge` command and let it merge a completely unrelated commit? Ciao, Johannes
