Re: Inadequate branch support in VC

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 11/20/2014 07:30 PM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> The sort of good news: there is an amend capability.  Nothing newer than
> svn supports it, though - in particular, the git back end could but does not.
> (SRC wlll support it.)  It's accessed through log-view, which is ... even
> more confusing than the rest of the code.

Huh, I didn't know about that.

First, the git backend does support amending, but in a very different 
way (press `C-c C-e' in log-edit buffer, when making a new commit). That 
doesn't allow amending when you have to modified files, though, which is 
something that I do often. Improving that would be good.

Second, `log-view-modify-change-comment' doesn't seem to support modern 
backends at all because `log-view-extract-comment' unconditionally calls 
`log-view-current-file'. This should be easy to fix.

Third, doing message editing in log-view might be a natural way to go 
about it, but editing any but the last commit (and even it, if it's been 
pushed) is a dangerous operation in Git, which we shouldn't make too 
easy for users to perform.

Should there be, like, a check that the given comment is not reachable 
from any of the "remote" refs?

> Dmitri is correct.  VC needs a set of branching primitives:
> get-current-branch, set-current-branch, create-branch, delete-branch,
> rename-branch.  And we need a standard way to exercise them in the
> UI.  Both are presently lacking.

You probably meant Eli here. :)