RFC: Possibility to re-edit last commit message

[Jari Aalto]

John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:
>>> message could be re-edited
>>>
>>>     bzr ci --re-edit
>>>
>>> And that would bring up the editor just like last time. After exiting
>>> the editor, that message would be updated (no files updated)
>> 
>> But if someone has pulled the branch in the meantime, and you change
>> the message without creating a new commit, you're in a world of pain.
>> So just uncommit, edit the message and recommit. It might be nice to
>> have a plugin that does it for you though.
>> 
> I always thought of this as a "bzr recommit" command. Which could do 2
> things.
>
[...]
> For the message, if we spawned an editor with the old message, I could
> always just accept it. But the command should support '-m' like the
> current commit command does.

The reason why "bzr ci --re-edit" is imporartant is that there are many
non-native speaker's that make typos and grammar mistakes all the time.
We just don't notice them but only after looking the message second time
(after the commit is already happened).

I don't know internals how the thing has been implemented, but
culd the message have a minor version (flag?) that is incremented
after each change. The log would only show the latest message, although
the repository would just keep all messages.

I mean:

 a)
        file.txt --> ci     r1
        msgA                r1 (1)
 b)
        ... Ooops, re-edit ...
        msgA    --> ci      internally: r1 (2)
                            r1               (to the outside)

Someone doing a branch at point (a), would still get the updated
message after "pull" at (b), when the merge would put (b) to the
front of message stack (being number 2).

Jari