merge: allow to pretend a merge is made into a different branch
When a series of patches for a topic-B depends on having topic-A,
the workflow to prepare the topic-B branch would look like this:
$ git checkout -b topic-B main
$ git merge --no-ff --no-edit topic-A
$ git am <mbox-for-topic-B
When topic-A gets updated, recreating the first merge and rebasing
the rest of the topic-B, all on detached HEAD, is a useful
technique. After updating topic-A with its new round of patches:
(0) check out the current topic-B.
(1) find the previous merge of topic-A into topic-B.
(2) detach the HEAD to the parent of the previous merge.
(3) merge the updated topic-A to it.
(4) reapply the patches to rebuild the rest of topic-B.
(5) update topic-B with the result.
without contaminating the reflog of topic-B too much. topic-B@{1}
is the "logically previous" state before topic-A got updated, for
example. At (4), comparison (e.g. range-diff) between HEAD and
@{-1} is a meaningful way to sanity check the result, and the same
can be done at (5) by comparing topic-B and topic-B@{1}.
But there is one glitch. The merge into the detached HEAD done in
the step (3) above gives us "Merge branch 'topic-A' into HEAD", and
does not say "into topic-B".
Teach the "--into-name=<branch>" option to "git merge" and its
underlying "git fmt-merge-message", to pretend as if we were merging
into <branch>, no matter what branch we are actually merging into,
when they prepare the merge message. The pretend name honors the
usual "into <target>" suppression mechanism, which can be seen in
the tests added here.