autorebase VS git-branchless

> It should be possible to sync all of my branches (or some subset) via merge or rebase, in a single operation.

Not sure if this is exactly what the author is looking for but I made Autorebase exactly for this.

https://github.com/Timmmm/autorebase

Great article btw. A lot of those things are way harder than they should be.

That sounds great! I have partly solved this issue in my autorebase tool (https://github.com/Timmmm/autorebase) - it basically rebases every branch, and fixes the commit time so that stacked branches get preserved even after a rebase just because the hashes all match properly.

That obviously doesn't work if you modify or drop any of the commits, so this option is very welcome!

I have a tool that will automatically pull master and rebase all of your branches onto it, or as far as it can without conflicts.

I use a similar workflow and also got fed up with constantly rebasing branches so I made Autorebase to do it for me. It works really well and there were a surprising number of edge cases to handle, e.g. what happens when you run it from another worktree? What happens if the branch you want to rebase is checked out in another worktree? Etc.

When I was doing more hardcore dev instead of SRE'ing I settled on git branchless, was well worth the experimenting you have to do to get it into your mental model.

now that I hardly ever have 2 layer deep stacks I just settle on my go-to git client which is magit. It just takes a couple of keystrokes to do a couple of stacked rebases.

[1]: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless

Yes, but due to its simplicity + extensibility + widespread adoption, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re still using Git 100+ years from now.

The current trend (most popular and IMO likely to succeed) is to make tools (“layers”) which work on top of Git, like more intuitive UI/patterns (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit, https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless) and smart merge resolvers (https://github.com/Symbolk/IntelliMerge, https://docs.plasticscm.com/semanticmerge/how-to-configure/s...). Git it so flexible, even things that it handles terribly by default, it handles

> Is this for a case where a bunch of people branch from master@HEAD (lets call this A), then you need to modify A, so you then need to rebase each branch that branched from A individually?

Mainly it's for when you branch from A multiple times, and then modify A. This can happen if you have some base work that you build multiple features on top of. I routinely do this as part of rapid prototyping, as described here: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Workflow:-div...

`git undo` shows a list of operations it'll execute, which you have to confirm before accepting. Of course, it's ultimately a matter of trust in the tools you use.

What happens is you work somewhere that has stacked diffs and suddenly you learn how to shape your diffs to make them easy to review. Thinking of how folks will review your code in chunks while writing it makes it cleaner. Having small but easy to read diffs makes reviews faster and helps junior devs learn how to review.

Sometimes this doesn’t happen in which case you end up need to split your commit at the end. This is where git utterly fails. You end up needing git split and git absorb to make this productive.

Git split let’s you select which chunks in a commit should belong to it and then splits that into a commit and then you do it again and again until you have lots of commits. You’ll still need to probably test each one but the majority of the work is done

Git absorb takes changes on the top of your stack and magically finds which commit in your stack the each chunk should belong to and amends it to the right commit

You also need git branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless as it lets you move up and down the stack without needing to remember so much git arcana.