Support interactive commit

[John Carr]

When committing in git, a user can choose to "git add -p" so that a subset of a bunch of hunks in the working copy can committed. They enumerate over all hunks and pick and ignore and can also break down hunks into smaller hunks.

This can be emulated in bzr using shelve (and it even has colored diffs!) - but when you are used to git add -p its the wrong way round. I want to pick the hunks to commit, not the hunks to hide. And when the commit happens, i want my working copy to have all the hunks again.

How can we make this way of working nicer for GNOMies trying out Bazaar instead of Git? This might be a case for the ideas around the git index / staging area that were suggested, or as simple as an option that ran shelve in reverse.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

There is an interactive commit plugin already; I don't think an index is needed or even relevant for committing things which are dynamically generated - all that is needed is UI and a tree wrapper (or similar construct).

[John Carr (johncarr)]

I guess I can move this to the list of plugins to tell git users they will want and close the report :)

Robert: What happened to your staging area that was discussed a while ago? Sorry i lost the link to the mailing archive.

[James Westby (james-w)]

On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 22:45 +0000, John Carr wrote:
> I guess I can move this to the list of plugins to tell git users they
> will want and close the report :)

I don't think it's that polished yet, unless it has changed recently.
Investing some time in it would be great.

Thanks,

James

[Dimitrios Apostolou (jimis)]

I'd also like to see interactive commit functionality in bzr, I've needed it several times. It's also on the wishlist: http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrWishlist

I'd appreciate if the functionality existed as simple as "bzr ci -i" without installing any plugins.