rebase--helper: add a builtin helper for interactive rebases

Git's interactive rebase is still implemented as a shell script, despite
its complexity. This implies that it suffers from the portability point
of view, from lack of expressibility, and of course also from
performance. The latter issue is particularly serious on Windows, where
we pay a hefty price for relying so much on POSIX.

Unfortunately, being such a huge shell script also means that we missed
the train when it would have been relatively easy to port it to C, and
instead piled feature upon feature onto that poor script that originally
never intended to be more than a slightly pimped cherry-pick in a loop.

To open the road toward better performance (in addition to all the other
benefits of C over shell scripts), let's just start *somewhere*.

The approach taken here is to add a builtin helper that at first intends
to take care of the parts of the interactive rebase that are most
affected by the performance penalties mentioned above.

In particular, after we spent all those efforts on preparing the sequencer
to process rebase -i's git-rebase-todo scripts, we implement the `git
rebase -i --continue` functionality as a new builtin, git-rebase--helper.

Once that is in place, we can work gradually on tackling the rest of the
technical debt.

Note that the rebase--helper needs to learn about the transient
--ff/--no-ff options of git-rebase, as the corresponding flag is not
persisted to, and re-read from, the state directory.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index b1020b875f..833ef3b0b7 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -114,6 +114,7 @@
 /git-read-tree
 /git-rebase
 /git-rebase--am
+/git-rebase--helper
 /git-rebase--interactive
 /git-rebase--merge
 /git-receive-pack