git-rebase.txt: document behavioral differences between modes

There are a variety of aspects that are common to all rebases regardless
of which backend is in use; however, the behavior for these different
aspects varies in ways that could surprise users.  (In fact, it's not
clear -- to me at least -- that these differences were even desirable or
intentional.)  Document these differences.

Signed-off-by: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This commit is contained in:
Elijah Newren
2018-06-27 00:23:17 -07:00
committed by Junio C Hamano
parent 4d34dffbdd
commit 0661e49aeb
2 changed files with 55 additions and 0 deletions

View File

@ -90,3 +90,26 @@ directory rename detection support in:
simply not implemented. Further, to implement this, directory rename
detection logic would need to move from merge-recursive to
diffcore-rename.
* am
git-am tries to avoid a full three way merge, instead calling
git-apply. That prevents us from detecting renames at all, which may
defeat the directory rename detection. There is a fallback, though; if
the initial git-apply fails and the user has specified the -3 option,
git-am will fall back to a three way merge. However, git-am lacks the
necessary information to do a "real" three way merge. Instead, it has
to use build_fake_ancestor() to get a merge base that is missing files
whose rename may have been important to detect for directory rename
detection to function.
* rebase
Since am-based rebases work by first generating a bunch of patches
(which no longer record what the original commits were and thus don't
have the necessary info from which we can find a real merge-base), and
then calling git-am, this implies that am-based rebases will not always
successfully detect directory renames either (see the 'am' section
above). merged-based rebases (rebase -m) and cherry-pick-based rebases
(rebase -i) are not affected by this shortcoming, and fully support
directory rename detection.