Request for rebaseif extension to be provided by default with rebase

[Sébastien Deleuze]

Hi,

In my company, we are using Mercurial with more and more people, and
while we setup training and guidelines, I would like to share some
feedbacks about one point that make Mercurial a magnitude of order
easier to use : rebaseif extension
(http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/RebaseIfExtension).

We are using continuous integration on 1 or 2 branches of our
projects, some people are usually working on the same branch. We don't
encourage peolple to push anonymous heads because it does not work
well with continous integration, and people (especially beginners) can
be quickly lost.

Before discovering rebasif extension, we had some real issues to give
people guidelines about the right thing to do after pulling remote
changes. 80% of times, remote and local changes does not concern same
files, so rebase is fine, but in 20% of time, when there is some
conflict rebase can quickly become a nightmare.

Since we have deployed rebaseif and updated our guidelines to tell
people to do a "pull --rebaseif" when their push failed, we have seen
a really strong improvement of Mercurial ease of use, people are happy
and efficiency is better.

When it is possible without conflicts, a rebase is done.
When this is not possible, a merge occur with kdiff3 configured by default.
Projects history are now far better (no more bullshit merge).

I am strongly convinced rebaseif is a killer feature for Mercurial,
more than 40 developpers (beginners to experts) are now using it, they
all claims that ths feature make their job easier.

As asked on Matt Blog (http://www.selenic.com/blog/?p=712#comments),
inclusion of rebaseif feature in default rebase extension would help a
lot of people.
I have contacted Marcus Lindblom Sonestedt, the rebaseif extension
author, to know its point of view, he answers me he is ok for that,
and could work to make this happen.

So, I would like to have some feedbacks for Mercurial community about
this extension, and if Matt, Stefano or other Mercurial developer
would be ok to merge it into rebase extension.

It seems this question have been asked previously
(http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2010-December/036227.html)
with not clear answer.
If the name "rebaseif" is an issue, maybe it could be updated to a
better one if there is some good proposal.

Inclusion of rebaseif in rebase could allow thirdparty tools like
TortoiseHg or MercurialEclipse, to use this feature.

Regards,
Sébastien