Moving part of a subtree of branches, using branch names?

[claytonrcarter]

Hi, I'm still new to git-branchless but so far it's been great. I'm currently using v 0.3.8 in a git repo w/ ~13k commits. I'm using it with branches (we use GitLab and merge requests, which require branches) and we often have braches stacked on top of each other.

The git move docs say this:

    -b, --base <BASE>
            A commit inside a subtree to move. The entire subtree, starting from the main branch,
            will be moved, not just the commits descending from this commit

Note the part about "starting from the main branch". Is there a way to config what branch this starts from?

For example, if I have the following branch structure (where each branch could have many commits):

main - a - b - c

And I want to move b and c onto main, but leave a as is. Like this:

main - b - c
   \- a

I am doing this now via git move -s <sha of first commit in b> -d main, but it would be really handy to be able to continue using branch names instead of looking up SHAs. I tried something like git move --source a --base c --dest main thinking that perhaps this might select the commits between a & c, but no luck.

Any tricks or tips that I might be missing?

And thanks again for this tool. It's wonderful!

[arxanas]

Hi @claytonrcarter, I'm glad that you're finding git-branchless useful!

In my workflows, I actually do end up copy-pasting the commit hash for various operations (which is not ideal). In this specific case, does b refer to a commit hash or a branch name? If it's a branch name, you should still be able to run

$ git move -s b -d main

to move the stack starting from b.

If not, some notes:

• There isn't currently a good way of selecting def456 and its descendants when your stack looks like this: abc123 branch-1 -> def456 -> ghi789 branch-2 other than via commit hash. Implement support for revsets #175 or Implement some form of interactive rebase #177 (comment) might be able to help in this case in the future.
• There currently isn't a good way to move a commit without moving its descendants. Support moving individual commits without their descendants #176 would let us do this.

I haven't had a lot of time to do feature work lately, but if you're interested in implementing one of the above, I'm happy to set up a call to walk you through the codebase and figure out what needs to be done.

[claytonrcarter]

Hi, thank you for the reply, and sorry I wasn't more clear! I held off on responding sooner because it wasn't clear to me that what I wanted to do wasn't actually possible, but I think now I've confirmed that it's not, so here goes again!

In my example above, I intended letters a, b and c to be branches each containing multiple commits, so your comment about selecting def456 is exactly my use case. Though it's not terribly onerous to use a commit hash, it would be very handy (again, in my use cases w/ lots of branches) to be able to do something like git move --branch c --dest main --stop-at a or something similar.

Thanks again and I appreciate the offer to show me the code base. If I get some time, I may try to tinker on something; either something like this or #176. I have been wanting to explore Rust; perhaps this is the excuse I need!

[arxanas]

Unfortunately, there's not something like that directly, so we'd have to build that feature.

[arxanas]

For the future reader, it's now possible to run something like git move -s 'children(a)' -d 'main()' to move all descendant commits/branches of a.