git-absorb VS stgit

Nice, no need to look up past commits ! Didn't know about this, I had to look it up.

It's a separate project from git [0].

[0]: https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

Boy have I got the thing for you. git absorb - https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

The way to work with it is:

    git add file1

You can also manage via a holistic UI: - Bisection - Log and reflog, stashes - subtrees, submodules - certain third party subcommands like git-absorb, and extend it with your own - interact with issues and pull requests via forge - pretty much all of the hundreds of CLI flags via a modal UI that got generalized and extracted to a lib called transient - well-integrated diff and conflict resolution (which is mostly just smerge) - the rebase/cherry-pick workflows I liked the best, including support for --update-refs - at any time you can always press a key to see the raw commands and output that it's using, which taught me a ton of corner cases - IMO it has a great manual

I sometimes use git-absorb to help me if I made a tonne of changes, and can't be arsed to manually make the fixups

If done well, your git history carries the information of your process in a very similar way.

You have to be somewhere in the middle, so I'd say to do a semantic rebase at last step before merge. A fantastic tool that is not so well-known is git-absorb, which helps a lot doing that cleanly and automatically.

https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

Squash merge is like a sledge hammer, interactive rebase + git reset -N HEAD^ + git-absorb + git add -p (or even better, Magit) are surgical tools.

The article seems to present a dichotomy between what the author terms a "clean" git history, which he seems to think is a history where multiple commits are squashed into single commits that contain, I guess "one feature", and the unnamed "other" way of doing it, which the author doesn't really elaborate what exactly it is, but he appears to means willy nilly uncurated commits of whatever? To me, both ways he talks about are insane.

With something like stgit[1], it is dead easy to maintain a stack of curated, small un-squashed git-bisectable commits, and your commit history looks like the work of a supernatural genius who knows exactly what he's doing and rarely makes mistakes, and if you have to port your patches (commits) across multiple variants of the same source (think linux drivers ported to multiple distro kernels) that's easy too.

[1] https://stacked-git.github.io/

Pijul needs a 1.0 release if it wants wide adoption. I don't understand why they wait.

Meanwhile, if rebasing on git is an issue, you should probably try stacked-git (https://stacked-git.github.io/). It manages commits as a stack of patches - like quilt, but on top of git.

I just think there's a lot good ideas floating around the git community, for example Stacked Git and gitstatus, but somehow none of this connects with Git developers.

Tangentially related, sometimes I find Stacked Git helpful when figuring out complex features or refactoring. Until it's nearly finished I'm not sure what would be worthwhile submitting as a PR but once it's ready then several smaller PRs are much easier to understand.

It's local stacked PRs and you can jump between them to edit as the ideas evolve.

https://stacked-git.github.io/

But if the nearby code is evolving quickly from other people this can be a bad approach because of merge hell when the work is finally submitted.

Note: there are also tools like https://stacked-git.github.io/ to help manage this.

Maybe checkout StGit: https://stacked-git.github.io/ I have not used it by myself yet, but I think it's capable of what you're trying to do.