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authorShawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>2007-02-17 04:31:50 -0500
committerJunio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>2007-02-17 10:08:21 -0800
commit5ca2db53763ed93a75de7ddbda753fc09327d7aa (patch)
treeea2566b2f62de6956b08a2d3b4e03238dcd6b6f5 /Documentation
parent185c975faaa790a98a4e00f124461473283500d6 (diff)
downloadgit-5ca2db53763ed93a75de7ddbda753fc09327d7aa.tar.gz
Attempt to improve git-rebase lead-in description.
It was mentioned on #git this morning that the lead-in description of git-rebase is very confusing. Too many branch this and branch that in a very short run of text. This new description attempts to walk the user through the command syntax, while also describing exactly what git-rebase is doing to their repository. Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/git-rebase.txt22
1 files changed, 14 insertions, 8 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
index f2ef1f7dc0..a66b2d73c5 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-rebase.txt
@@ -13,11 +13,20 @@ SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
-----------
-git-rebase replaces <branch> with a new branch of the same name. When
-the --onto option is provided the new branch starts out with a HEAD equal
-to <newbase>, otherwise it is equal to <upstream>. It then attempts to
-create a new commit for each commit from the original <branch> that does
-not exist in the <upstream> branch.
+If <branch> is specified, git-rebase will perform an automatic
+`git checkout <branch>` before doing anything else. Otherwise
+it remains on the current branch.
+
+All changes made by commits in the current branch but that are not
+in <upstream> are saved to a temporary area. This is the same set
+of commits that would be shown by `git log <upstream>..HEAD`.
+
+The current branch is reset to <upstream>, or <newbase> if the
+--onto option was supplied. This has the exact same effect as
+`git reset --hard <upstream>` (or <newbase>).
+
+The commits that were previously saved into the temporary area are
+then reapplied to the current branch, one by one, in order.
It is possible that a merge failure will prevent this process from being
completely automatic. You will have to resolve any such merge failure
@@ -26,9 +35,6 @@ that caused the merge failure with `git rebase --skip`. To restore the
original <branch> and remove the .dotest working files, use the command
`git rebase --abort` instead.
-Note that if <branch> is not specified on the command line, the currently
-checked out branch is used.
-
Assume the following history exists and the current branch is "topic":
------------