GitLens interactive rebase feature & rebase --edit-todo

[eamodio]

I'm not sure if this is the right/best place to post this, so please forgive me if not.

I'm working on expanding the capabilities of the interactive rebase feature I shipped recently in GitLens to continue through the rebase as it pauses.

See here for the current WIP:

My question is since I'm currently allowing the user to modify the rebase steps that are still "todo", do I need to call git rebase --edit-todo? It seems to work fine without it, but I'm not sure if I'm getting lucky or causing not yet seen issues.

Thanks!

[derrickstolee]

My guess is that git rebase --edit-todo is the most future-proof way to do it. Without that, you are relying on the "internal" data layout of Git and git rebase in particular.

While it is very unlikely that we would change the name of the TODO file, it is certainly a possibility.

@dscho will know more about whether current work in git rebase has potential to disrupt your work.

[eamodio]

Since Git (AFAIK) doesn't provide any access to the rebase steps other than the TODO file, I'm highly reliant on the TODO file and its structure (even before a rebase starts). Although, I guess I also don't understand the usage of --edit-todo because as documented it doesn't take any other input -- so it would rely on some other mechanism for updating the TODO file or something right?

Also, FYI, this feature is built on the TODO file itself, as I structured this as a "custom editor" in VS Code, which means this is just a UI "view" on top of the actual file itself.

I also currently rely on a lot of other rebase files to determine the current state:

https://github.com/eamodio/vscode-gitlens/blob/3509a3a247ee7b799c92334874088dd7e8764149/src/git/gitService.ts#L2447-L2515

I'm not sure if there is any other way for Git to provide me with that information (without reading all those files directly).

[dscho]

In Git's test suite, we override GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR to edit the git-rebase-todo file.

As @derrickstolee hinted, there are good reasons to use git rebase --edit-todo to edit this file: it lints the written todo list (and exits with a non-zero code if an error was detected), and it also expands the commit hashes to avoid collisions.

[eamodio]

Ah! Awesome -- that makes a lot of sense and tells me how I should use it more! Thank you both!

[eamodio]

@dscho It seems that if there is an issue in the TODO file, rebase --edit-todo reports the errors, but then opens the TODO file for editing. Is there any way to avoid that part? I just want the linting & fixup.

[dscho]

You could set the editor to cat, for example, or to true, e.g. git -c sequence.editor=true rebase --edit-todo.

[eamodio]

Oh sweet! Thanks!