# Server side merges and rebases (& new rebase/cherry-pick UI?) (Elijah) - Elijah: tried to implement the git side of the cherry pick as flags to git merge subcommand, but everything turned out to be incompatible. Used git merge-tree instead, much better, but this doesn't create a new commit, only a new top-level tree. - Rebase and cherry-pick is even more tricky because we need sequences of commits. Does the current UI make sense? - I want to create commits on a not-checked out branch, or rebase, or cherry-pick. Not only on the server, but on any client. - Rebase skips cherry-picks, but that is probably just an optimization for when rebase for a shell script. Always doing cherry-picks is faster these days, but is a behavior change - Creating a new commit and modifying the working tree - this lets hooks run, but I don't want them to run the server - Rebase and cherry-pick are typically centered around HEAD, I would prefer to replace with just a commit range. If you don't make the assumption around HEAD, cherry-pick and rebase aren't that different. - How do we display conflicts generated on the server side so that ? We don't have a representation for that. Taylor: Probably just block the operation on the server. Elijah: That's my intuition too. - We have a lot of users who want to cherry-pick a commit on a bunch of LTS branches, it would be great if they don't have to check out those branches. - What about cherry-picking to older branches? It's super slow to check out the old branch and it's a big pain to update. - Want to be able to replay merges. Not just like rebase --rebase-merges, but with extra content/resolutions - Emily: Rebase has famously bad UX. Could we create a new command that fixes the problems, like checkout and switch? Elijah: I'm worried that I'll copy the old terminology, so I'd need feedback on that. - Stolee: We could rework the underlying API that supports rebase and cherry-pick and use that for the new UX. - Jrnieder: We don't have plumbing commands for this yet, which would be very nice to have. For changes motivated by "cherry-pick has this bad behavior", if we're not making an overall better UX then I'd encourage "go ahead and make cherry-pick no longer have that bad behavior" - Jonathantanmy: I think base + theirs + ours is good enough. Elijah: Sounds like git merge-tree, I don't think that's enough for the server case. I'm sometimes porting over multiple commits instead of just one, ort can do some optimizations on that, but one-by-one invocations would lose that info. Also, this isn't enough to replay merges. - Peff: It would be good to have a machine-readable representation of a conflict that the server can serve, but also can be materialized by client tools. Taylor: It would be even cooler if we could push that representation and have "collaborative" merge resolution. Elijah: Merge-tree can output files with conflict markers. We'd have to add info to represent the index conflict. With rebase, we'd need to represent different conflicts at different points. - Martin: Does ort handle conflicts with renames? E.g. renaming two files to the same name. Elijah: Yes - Elijah: One format would be input to git update-ref --stdin, so instead of making all of changes, you could output the data that git update-refs can ingest later. - Waleed: Do you support rebasing non-linear sequences? Elijah: Yes, but.. (didn't hear)
