README.md

Baes

Welcome to your new gem! In this directory, you'll find the files you need to be able to package up your Ruby library into a gem. Put your Ruby code in the file lib/baes. To experiment with that code, run bin/console for an interactive prompt.

TODO: Delete this and the text above, and describe your gem

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'baes'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install baes

Usage

TODO: Write usage instructions here

Anatomy of a Rebase

Let’s imagine we have the following chain of branches:

main
  branch_01 # based on main
    branch_02 # based on branch_01
      branch_03 # based on branch_02

We can say the top commit on main has hash m1. branch_01 will have a1, branch_02 will have a1,b1, and branch_03 has a1,b1,c1.

Now let’s say we rebase merge branch_01 onto main. If we rebase or squash commits onto another branch, it actually generates a new commit hash, even if the code changes are the same. So main will have hashes m1,a2, where a2 is a new hash for the same changes as a1. In this scenario, branch_02 will still have commits a1,b1 even though main has an equivalent commit a2. So what do we do? We rebase!

git rebase main branch_02

There are a series of possible outcomes.

1. It tosses commit a1 because it has no changes from what is on main. Here we are left with a new b2 commit hash on branch_02.
2. Maybe you made some slight changes to branch_01 based on feedback. When you rebase you end up with a conflict! Well, in this case the conflict is easy to resolve if it’s on a1. You simply skip it since you only care about commit b1: git rebase --skip. Then you again end up with b2, or maybe you have a conflict there as well, which you will need to resolve manually and use git rebase --continue.
3. Maybe you made some major changes to branch_01 based on feedback. Because of this there is no overlap between the new a2 on main and the a1 on branch_02. When you rebase branch_02 on main, it cleanly applies the changes, leaving you with a3,b2 on branch_02. This is the least optimal scenario, since you probably want commit a3 to go away. You’ll need to do do an interactive rebase git rebase -i main branch_02 and manually delete that commit. Thankfully, this doesn’t seem to happen all that often.

baes helps you easily address the first two cases. It rebases all of your branches on the base branch (main by default). If it hits a conflict in the process, it will prompt you to skip this step in the rebase. If we are confident we only have one commit on our branch that we care about, we can skip up to the top commit:

$ baes
conflict rebasing branch branch_01 on main
skip commit 1 of 2? (y/n) y
conflict rebasing branch branch_01 on main
skip commit 2 of 2? (y/n) n

Then we fix the code and run git rebase --continue. This enables you to have long chains of branches without nearly as much of the tedium of handling rebase conflicts. If that’s still not fast enough for you and you’re feeling daring, you can run with the --auto-skip flag, which will automatically skip and only stop on the top commit. This has the caveats that 1) you should be sure you only have one commit on each branch and 2) you don’t have any one-off branches with a bunch of commits that might conflict, as it’ll skip those. The upshot is that on a branch like that you’ll probably end up with conflicts on the last commit as well, so you’ll be able to abort the rebase process (git rebase --abort) and restart it from scratch to handle the conflicts manually.

Once all your branches are rebased, you can clean up any that are up to date with main:

git checkout main && git branch --merged | grep -v "\(main\|master\|staging\)" | xargs -r git br -d

You can find a more aggressive git cleanup helper here.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/baes. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Baes project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.