Re: "git subtree --squash" interacts poorly with revert, merge, and rebase

From: Matt McCutchen <matt@mattmccutchen.net>
Date: Nov 14, 2016, 22:37 UTC
Message-ID: <1479163040.2406.49.camel@mattmccutchen.net>
In-Reply-To: <1478814800.2878.10.camel@mattmccutchen.net>

On Thu, 2016-11-10 at 16:53 -0500, Matt McCutchen wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 19:07 -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> > 
> > Maybe we would never hit any of these problems in practice, but they
> > give me a bad enough feeling that I'm planning to write my own tool
> > that tracks the upstream commit ID in a file (like a submodule) and
> > doesn't generate any extra commits.  Without generating extra commits,
> > the only place to store the upstream content in the superproject would
> > be in another subtree, which would take up disk space in every working
> > tree unless developers manually set skip-worktree.  I think I prefer to
> > not store the upstream content and just have the tool fetch it from a
> > local subproject repository each time it's needed.
> > 
> > I'll of course post the tool on the web and would be happy to see it
> > integrated into "git subtree" if that makes sense, but I don't know how
> > much time I'd be willing to put into making that happen.
> 
> I have named my tool "git subtree-lite" and posted it here:
> 
> https://mattmccutchen.net/utils/git-subtree-lite.git/

As I was doing additional research in preparation for adding git- subtree-lite to the tools page (https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,_and_tools), by chance I found an existing tool, Braid (http://cristibalan.github.io/braid/), whose design meets my requirements. I have a few minor concerns, but assuming I'm able to fix them without too much work and upstream accepts my patches, I plan to switch to Braid.

I've made a properly marked section on the tools page for subproject management tools:

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,_and_tools#Subprojects_or_sets_of_repositories

in the hope that the next person with the same requirements as me finds Braid. (I unfortunately didn't check that page before starting, but I will the next time I need something.)

Matt