rebase -i: introduce --rebase-merges=[no-]rebase-cousins

When running `git rebase --rebase-merges` non-interactively with an
ancestor of HEAD as <upstream> (or leaving the todo list unmodified),
we would ideally recreate the exact same commits as before the rebase.

However, if there are commits in the commit range <upstream>.. that do not
have <upstream> as direct ancestor (i.e. if `git log <upstream>..` would
show commits that are omitted by `git log --ancestry-path <upstream>..`),
this is currently not the case: we would turn them into commits that have
<upstream> as direct ancestor.

Let's illustrate that with a diagram:

        C
      /   \
A - B - E - F
  \   /
    D

Currently, after running `git rebase -i --rebase-merges B`, the new branch
structure would be (pay particular attention to the commit `D`):

       --- C' --
      /         \
A - B ------ E' - F'
      \    /
        D'

This is not really preserving the branch topology from before! The
reason is that the commit `D` does not have `B` as ancestor, and
therefore it gets rebased onto `B`.

This is unintuitive behavior. Even worse, when recreating branch
structure, most use cases would appear to want cousins *not* to be
rebased onto the new base commit. For example, Git for Windows (the
heaviest user of the Git garden shears, which served as the blueprint
for --rebase-merges) frequently merges branches from `next` early, and
these branches certainly do *not* want to be rebased. In the example
above, the desired outcome would look like this:

       --- C' --
      /         \
A - B ------ E' - F'
  \        /
   -- D' --

Let's introduce the term "cousins" for such commits ("D" in the
example), and let's not rebase them by default. For hypothetical
use cases where cousins *do* need to be rebased, `git rebase
--rebase=merges=rebase-cousins` needs to be used.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
index 7f1756f1eb..fe681d6928 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
@@ -380,7 +380,7 @@ rebase.instructionFormat.  A customized instruction format will automatically
 have the long commit hash prepended to the format.
 
 -r::
---rebase-merges::
+--rebase-merges[=(rebase-cousins|no-rebase-cousins)]::
 	By default, a rebase will simply drop merge commits from the todo
 	list, and put the rebased commits into a single, linear branch.
 	With `--rebase-merges`, the rebase will instead try to preserve
@@ -389,9 +389,16 @@ have the long commit hash prepended to the format.
 	manual amendments in these merge commits will have to be
 	resolved/re-applied manually.
 +
-This mode is similar in spirit to `--preserve-merges`, but in contrast to
-that option works well in interactive rebases: commits can be reordered,
-inserted and dropped at will.
+By default, or when `no-rebase-cousins` was specified, commits which do not
+have `<upstream>` as direct ancestor will keep their original branch point,
+i.e. commits that would be excluded by gitlink:git-log[1]'s
+`--ancestry-path` option will keep their original ancestry by default. If
+the `rebase-cousins` mode is turned on, such commits are instead rebased
+onto `<upstream>` (or `<onto>`, if specified).
++
+The `--rebase-merges` mode is similar in spirit to `--preserve-merges`, but
+in contrast to that option works well in interactive rebases: commits can be
+reordered, inserted and dropped at will.
 +
 It is currently only possible to recreate the merge commits using the
 `recursive` merge strategy; Different merge strategies can be used only via