Re: using stgit/guilt for public branches

From: Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org>
Date: May 3, 2007, 20:58 UTC
Message-ID: <20070503205836.GA19253@nan92-1-81-57-214-146.fbx.proxad.net>
In-Reply-To: <200704252337.05851.robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com>

On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 11:37:05PM +0200, Robin Rosenberg wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> onsdag 25 april 2007 skrev Josef Sipek:
> > On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 03:20:49PM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> [...]
> > > I am concerned that publishing a git branch managed by stg/guilt
> > > would present problems: it seems that every time patches are re-ordered,
> > > a patch is re-written or removed, or we update from upstream,
> > > everyone who pulls the tree branch will have a hard-to-resolve conflict.
> > > 
> > > Is that really a problem? If so, would it be possible to work around this
> > > somehow?
> > 
> > I thought about this problem a while back when I was trying to decide how to
> > manage the Unionfs git repository. I came to the conclusion, that there was
> > no clean way of doing this (at least not using guilt - I can't really speak
> > for stgit, as I don't know how it does things exactly).
> 
> StGit has the same problem. Publishing such a branch is only for viewing if
> you want to publish the tip, like the pu branch in the Git repo. You shouldn't
> merge from pu either.

You are right, in that what can be done with such branches is limited. BUT you can safely "stg branch --create" off any remote stgit stack. Then you can "stg rebase origin/master" to port your stack to the new tip of the remote stack.

The next stgit release will allow you to declare the pull-policy for your stack as "rebase", so when you "stg pull" it will indeed rebase to the new tip of the parent branch.

As for publishing, I use the following config entries to publish my own stack of patches to stgit. You can see at http://repo.or.cz/w/stgit/ydirson.git that gitweb shows pretty clearly the structure of the stack (even though things could surely be made better).

I use "git push -f" to publish - maybe the "+" refspec syntax would work with push, I'll try it next time :)

[remote "orcz"]
        url = git+ssh://ydirson@repo.or.cz/srv/git/stgit/ydirson.git
        push = refs/heads/master:refs/heads/master
	push = refs/patches/master/*:refs/patches/master/*

Maybe we should provide some degree of automation in stgit itself (eg. "stg branch --publish" or something).

Hope this helps,

-- 
Yann.