Re: fast forward merge overwriting my code

[Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>]

On 30/05/2021 06:31, David Aguilar wrote:
> On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 11:51 AM Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email> wrote:
>> adding Pratyush for the Git Gui stash suggestion..
>> [...]
>>>>> So my Question is: is there any possibility, to be able to view (and
>>>>> even edit, if necessary) the changed notebook in the merging process
>>>>> (as in my example with the 3way merge)?
>>>> I'm not aware of such a mechanism (as simply described) but I'm sure
>>>> there are ways to use the "staging area" view (e.g. via the Git-gui) to
>>>> selectively pick out hunks and lines that are staged (and non-selected
>>>> hunk/lines stashed) to give a testable worktree during the 'merge'.
>>> Ah ok, this could be an idea (it would requiere some more research, as
>>> I haven't used the git gui before (I want to learn everything from the
>>> scratch using the command line))
>> I commonly use the Gui when picking apart a large commit into smaller
>> ones when I'm happy that there's no overlaps. Small patches make for
>> easier merging and fault finding, and better commit messages (good
>> thesis practice)
>>
>>> But to be honest, I think even this approach might already be too
>>> cumbersome (as this selectively picking and stashing sounds like a lot
>>> of work itself).
>> Unfortunately the Git Gui doesn't have a menu for stashing remaining
>> changes, but it's simple to flip over to the terminal to stash from
>> there to do the testing, and un-stash the remainder afterwards - I'll
>> maybe suggest the gui could include that capability for these types of
>> workflows (cc Pratyush Yadav <pratiy0100@gmail.com>).
> Tangential, and doesn't apply in this use case, but I should mention
> that Git Cola[1] has had this feature for a while now.

+1. I haven't used/tried Cola myself, so..

>
> Cola's Stash dialog allows you to do a regular stash and the "keep
> index" stash alluded to here. "keep index" retains whatever has
> already been staged.
>
> One feature unique to cola is its "stash the index" feature, which
> will only stash stuff that you've selectively staged. That's for the
> cases where you just want to stash away a small bit, and selectively
> choosing the inverse is a lot of work, so instead you can select just
> the bits you want to be stashed away and stash 'em.

Sounds good.
When I did a quick test (Git-Gui & cli) with staging one line of a two
line change and then stashing, I found that the stash pop failed with a
conflict (your 'lot of work') which I hadn't expected, which to me is
totally wrong (against the spirit of the stash command).

>
> There's no shame in using a GUI for interactive editing. Cola is
> designed to be driven through keyboard interactions so it's easy to
> interactively edit the index without having to use a mouse.
>
> Cola also has affordances that can make learning core Git easier
> (enable its GIT_COLA_TRACE=1 mode in the environment and it'll print
> out every git command it runs).
>
> [1] https://git-cola.github.io/
> [1] https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola
>
> cheers,
Thanks