Amend workflow problems

[alan-nf]

I'm having some trouble with amend and restacking in my real repository (note: it works totally fine in my test repo).

Here are my issues:

• If I git commit --amend, branchless doesn't know the commit is rewritten (it doesn't say it's rewritten in git sl)
• If I git amend I get an error that the command doesn't exist. I had to manually alias it. (I saw a PR where you stopped adding this alias, so this probably just a needed documentation update. If so let me know and I can edit the wiki page myself)
• If I git branchless amend (or add an amend alias) then it works, and git sl reports the rewritten commit, but a restack is not attempted.
• If I manually git restack it says there are no abandoned commits to restack. Aren't descendants of rewritten commits abandoned, or am I missing something? Here's the output:

➜  myrepo git:(b725e8d) ✗ git branchless amend
branchless: running command: git reset
branchless: processing 1 update: ref HEAD
No abandoned commits to restack.
No abandoned branches to restack.
⋮
◇ e994b6ca 1d (main, remote origin/main) <redacted>
┣━┓
┃ ◯ b4fced5b 23h (alan/feature1) <redacted>
┃ ┃
┃ ◯ d5272462 23h <redacted>
┃ ┃
┃ ◯ c56a74a2 23h <redacted>
┃ ┃
┃ ◯ fa4c6ddb 23h <redacted>
┃ ┣━┓
┃ ┃ ✕ b725e8d6 23h (rewritten as 06c16bb8) <redacted>     # rewritten commit
┃ ┃ ┃
┃ ┃ ◯ e1a9a7b5 23h <redacted>    # abandoned commits start here
┃ ┃ ┃
┃ ┃ ◯ 1576504d 23h <redacted>
┃ ┃ ┃
┃ ┃ ◯ 9a29234f 23h <redacted>
┃ ┃ ┃
┃ ┃ ◯ fe64f19b 23h <redacted>
┃ ┃ ┃
┃ ┃ ◯ c4c76e98 23h (alan/feature2) <redacted>
┃ ┃ ┃
┃ ┃ ◯ bd9a47f5 21h <redacted>
┃ ┃ ┃
┃ ┃ ◯ 04715177 21h <redacted>
┃ ┃ ┃
┃ ┃ ◯ f8200915 16h (alan/feature3) <redacted>
┃ ┃
┃ ● 06c16bb8 1s <redacted>   # new commit with the amended changes
┃
◯ b28977e1 23h (alan/some-other-feature) <redacted>
Amended with 1 uncommitted change.
➜  myrepo git:(06c16bb) git branchless restack
No abandoned commits to restack.
No abandoned branches to restack.
⋮
◇ e994b6ca 1d (main, remote origin/main) <redacted>
...

If I'm not misunderstanding this, is there a way I can troubleshoot what's going on? Like I said, this works in my test repo and is just not working in my main repo. Also note, I tried deleting the sqlite db and re-initing and that didn't help: the behavior remains the same.

Lastly, I was able to work around this by just doing a git move -s e1a9a7b5 --merge && git hide -r b725e8d6 which fixed me right up.

[arxanas]

Can you run git branchless bug-report (on v0.3.10+) after doing your failing amend and paste the output here?

[alan-nf]

You should notice that git restack starts working if the abandoned commits were created since the time you ran git branchless init.

Rebasing the commits in question (after git branchless init) doesn't seem to make it start working. Should that count as "created"? Is there some way for me to poke existing commits so they start getting tracked?

Fortunately, reproducing it in a test case turned out to be easy (added one line from the test case from #209). @alan-nf you can try a build including #326 and see if it resolves your issue.

Thanks for the potential fix, @arxanas. I'd be happy to test it. How would I go about testing a pull request build? Do I pull the repo on that restack branch and then cargo install from it directly somehow? And do I need to re-init branchless after getting the new build?

[claytonrcarter]

You can either build and install the binary "globally", or you can just build the binary and then run it w/o installing it. (At least, that's what I've been doing as I've been hacking around.)

# clone; checkout; then ...

# either install "globally" via ...
$ cargo install --path .
$ cd my-repo
$ git restack ... 

# or just build it and run it locally via ...
$ cargo build
$ cd my-repo
$ /path/to/git-branchless-repo/target/debug/git-branchless restack ...

I have been doing the former when I have a test feature I want to play with in real work, and the latter when I just want to test something one-off.

[alan-nf]

@claytonrcarter perfect thanks. I added that to a new section in the wiki development runbook

[alan-nf]

@arxanas I just tested #326 and it seemed to work perfectly. git amend successfully amended and restacked on its own. Thank you!

[arxanas]

@alan-nf thanks for updating the Wiki! For future reference, you can install from a remote branch directly like this:

$ cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless --branch restack

I updated the runbook with that information. @claytonrcarter I also added notes on using cargo run, which might simplify your workflow.