From: Stefan Sperling <stsp@stsp.name>
Subject: Re: No-op histedit scripts
To: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de>
Cc: gameoftrees@openbsd.org
Date: Tue, 30 May 2023 19:39:06 +0200

On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 05:10:19PM +0200, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> Let's say I start "histedit" and get the default all-pick template
> in the editor.  Oh no, I picked a bad starting point, the commit I
> wanted to change isn't even in there.  So I quit the editor without
> touching the script... and histedit proceeds to execute it.  No
> harm done, I guess, but nothing accomplished either.
> 
> Should histedit simply do nothing if the script hasn't been touched?
> Should it fast-forward to the tip?  Would this interact poorly with
> anything?

I have noticed this as well occasionally. It hasn't bothered me, and
there will be a histedit backup which can be used to revert any effects
of such "no-op" histedits if desired.

There is one use case I can think of where this behaviour is useful.
If you made commits with the wrong $GOT_AUTHOR info and fix $GOT_AUTHOR in
the environment you can then use got histedit in this way to have the
rewritten commits use the updated $GOT_AUTHOR value.

If $GOT_AUTHOR remains the same then only thing which changes is timestamps
of commits. That by itself is not useful, but strictly speaking it is not a
"no-op" either.