From: Evan Silberman <silby@elitemail.org>
Subject: Re: got reintegrate
To: Stefan Sperling <stsp@stsp.name>
Cc: gameoftrees@openbsd.org
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 08:21:53 -0700



> On Oct 12, 2019, at 8:02 AM, Stefan Sperling <stsp@stsp.name> wrote:
> 
> The command name is inspired by Subversion which has
> an "svn merge --reintegrate" command.

Having only used subversion in fairly elementary ways, now years ago, my first thought on seeing the name “reintegrate” was “why not just ‘integrate’?” I suppose “reintegrate” was meant to reflect that the branch had been “dis-integrated” from mainline and was now coming back.

I consider Got a great opportunity to carefully and crisply name commands. So far so good. I think “integrate”’s familiar meaning would be a good enough mnemonic here and calling the command “reintegrate” provides very little extra information.

An orthogonal name suggestion: “got adopt branch”, as in “adopt the commits and present state of the target branch as our own”. “Adopt” may also help to suggest the requirement that the target branch be descended from the present branch. “Integrate” or “reintegrate” are pretty close to “merge” in common meaning and don’t do much to suggest that they won’t work on a parallel history.

Evan