Re: StGIT vs. guilt: What's the difference?

From: Josef Sipek <jsipek@fsl.cs.sunysb.edu>
Date: Jun 17, 2007, 03:54 UTC
Message-ID: <20070617035426.GH7025@filer.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu>
In-Reply-To: <tnx1wgds1pv.fsf@arm.com>

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 03:59:24PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Karl Hasselström <kha@treskal.com> wrote:
> > On 2007-06-14 14:55:54 -0700, Steven Grimm wrote:
> >
> >> I've asked this on IRC a couple times and nobody seemed to have a
> >> good answer, so: These two tools seem like they are solving the same
> >> general problem using similar approaches. They are both under active
> >> development. In what areas is each of them stronger than the other?
> >> Why would one choose to use one of them instead of the other?
> >
> > I have never had a close look at guilt, but from what I remember it
> > stores patches as plain old plaintext patches (corrections to this
> > statement welcome). StGIT uses git's object database.

 
Sorry I missed this thread...

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> I haven't tried quilt either but, if it uses plain text patches, the
> disadvantage might be the losing of the three-way merge when pushing a
> patch onto the stack. The solution is to remember which commit the
> patch applies to, switch the tree, apply the patch and merge with
> HEAD.

 
Catalin: Perhaps a comparison table might be in order? This is most
definitely not the first time this question has been asked.

> Are the guilt patches accessible as commit objects at the top of the
> stack?

When you push a patch, you're doing:
	
	git-apply && git-commit

When you pop a patch, you're doing:

	git-reset --hard HEAD^

So, once a patch is pushes, it is a separate commit in the git tree, and one can run any valid git command on it.

Now, of course the actual implementation is little bit more complex (e.g., using git-write-tree and git-commit-tree, as well as allowing to pop several patches at the same time).

> StGIT might have some more features as it is older but I see a lot of
> development is going on with guilt.

I haven't looked at stgit in a number of months, but stgit most likely has many features which make use of the extra metadata stored.

I'm trying to take the simpler approach - most of the time, the user just want to push, refresh, and pop. With that said, there are plenty of useful commands (26 as of now).

> I would welcome such a discussion (so please keep me cc'ed) as we can
> share the experience with various issues.

Same here.

One additional thing. About four months ago, I've heard that stgit tends to blow up when you switch branches using git-checkout - guilt of course doesn't :) My information may be outdated, so corrections are welcome.

Josef "Jeff" Sipek.

-- 
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