Rebase on to ancestor on different branch

[Chris Gorman]

Hi,

I would like to know why the following pattern is not possible.

Having created a local feature branch (minor_feature - not intended to be shared with the world) I would like to rebase the work on it on to the tip of a well known branch (stable). However I have discovered that rebase finds nothing to be rebased in the case where stable has not progressed since branching away from it.

I appreciate that this breaks the rule that the destination of rebase can not be an ancestor of the source but can't work out why this should be prohibited in the simple case shown. I also understand that, branches aside, the topology would not actually change during the rebase. But given that the branch names are indeed significant to the topology, it only seems to be a special case in that stable has no further revisions commited to it. With a single extra revision on the tip of stable (say pulled in from elsewhere) I can of course perform the rebase

o  branch:minor_feature
|  rev:4
|  changeset:746d8191aa5d
|
o  branch:minor_feature
|  rev:3
|  changeset:520f565ba7f2
|
@  branch:stable
|  rev:2
|  changeset:64e7c753c090
|
o  branch:stable
|  rev:1
|  changeset:3dc55a5c9971
|
o  branch:stable
   rev:0
   changeset:fbf1f426945c

$hg rebase -b minor_feature
nothing to rebase

--
Thanks
Chris Gorman

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