Hi Victoria
On 04/11/2022 00:31, Victoria Dye wrote:
herr.kaste wrote:
Now, I should just have not used `--update-refs` in the first place but anyway
I decide late that I rather don't want to update "master" etc. and it should
probably not delete the local refs.
Agreed, this doesn't seem like desired behavior - the opposite of "update
the ref" isn't "delete the ref". ;)
The reason it's happening is because, when '--update-refs' is used, the
rebase starts by constructing a list of 'update_ref_record's for each of the
refs that *could* be updated. Each item in that list contains the
corresponding ref's "before" commit OID (i.e., what it currently points to)
and initializes the "after" OID to null. When an 'update-ref' line is
encountered in the 'rebase-todo', the "after" OID is updated with the
newly-rebased value. However, if an 'update-ref' line is removed from the
'rebase-todo', the "after" value is never updated. Then, when the rebase
finishes and the ref state data is applied, all of the entries with null
"after" OIDs are deleted.
The three options for a fix I can think of are:
1. initialize the "after" OID to the value of "before".
2. don't update refs with a null "after" OID.
3. initialize the "after" OID to the value of "before", don't update the
ref if "before" == "after".
I think #3 is the best option, since it avoids the unnecessary updates of #1
and leaves a cleaner path to a 'delete-ref' option (like the one proposed
elsewhere in the thread [1]) than #2. I'll send a patch shortly.
We should be removing the entry entirely if the user removes it from the
todo-list see b3b1a21d1a (sequencer: rewrite update-refs as user edits
todo list, 2022-07-19) where the commit message says
1. If a '<ref>/<before>/<after>' triple in the update-refs file does not
have a matching 'update-ref <ref>' command in the todo-list _and_ the
<after> value is the null OID, then remove that triple. Here, the
user removed the 'update-ref <ref>' command before it was executed,
since if it was executed then the <after> value would store the
commit at that position.
I think that is the best approach but it seems the implementation isn't
actually doing that.
Best Wishes
Phillip
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/CA+JQ7M-GbBTHZZ9xOLR=FitWFpUnkfuep9kSfNPxuSbJbKteGw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
Thanks for reporting!
- Victoria
