I’ve been working on a patch series for the Linux kernel. I had consolidated my changes into four patches, with a few more to go, when it dawned on me that I should review these patches myself before sending them to anyone else. Duh!

Reviewing the first patch, I discovered a few things I wanted to fix. If this was the fourth patch, I could directly use a squash commit to fix the problem. But a commit that’s had three patches on top of it was a bit much for me to handle directly. This was a perfect opportunity to try Magit for this. Magit’s manual claims you can squash into any commit. Cool.

So, following the manual, I created a squash commit on top of my fourth patch. Then I requested that Magit squash this into my first patch commit. This started a series of actions that were

  • resolve conflicts
  • continue the rebase

I resolved the conflicts with Emacs’ SMerge mode. As is often the case, I find Magit’s status in these cases not useful. I consulted git status in a terminal window, and it told me I needed to resolve conflicts. After resolving the conflicts, there was a suggestion of using git rebase --continue. So I tried it.

After doing this conflict resolution and continuing the rebase three times, the work was complete. I was delighted that it worked.

I don’t think I would have liked to try this from the command line!

For the future, I’d like to know if there’s a Magit command to continue a rebase. It wasn’t obvious to me at the time from the rebase screen in Magit. But the manual says you can use r r or magit-rebase-continue.

I also wonder if there’s some way I can modify the Magit status window to be more useful to me. That’s something that’s bothered me for a while when doing some operations. Many people rave about Magit, me included, but I find the status screen difficult to parse at times.