Dear list,
I would like to set up a repository that has multiple branches from a
upstream project merged at different paths. Also, I would like to be
able to access upstream history in my project (it is interpreted code,
and I would like to git-blame to display a mix of local and upstream
history line-by-line in the code).
I have documented the steps to demonstrate my desired repository
layout in the attached shell script snippet. It is self-contained and
sets up two repositories upstream and main-repo in /tmp. It then reads
two branches featureA and featureB from upstream into separate paths
in main-repo.
Then, the script modifies contents in the upstream repository. There
are modifications that apply to both featureA and featureB as well as
modifications to one branch only.
Up to this point, things seemed to work well using either git-subtree
or a combination of git-read-tree and "subtree" merge strategy.
Finally, the changes to upstream are to be pulled into the
corresponding paths in main-repo. Here, neither git-subtree nor git
pull with subtree merge do what I want. The changes that apply to one
of the features only are applied correctly. However, changes from the
common history of featureA and featureB are only applied to the path
that is updated first.
Apparently, git records that the common change has been applied and
doesn't apply it a second time (which is correct for ~99.9999999% of
all use cases). In this special case however, git does not take into
account that it applied the common change to a different path.
I found that git pull --squash would apply the right set of updates to
both featureA and featureB in main-repo (i.e. in this case, the common
change would be applied on each path). However, this would leave me
unlinked to upstream history.
Now:
1) Am I doing something completely wrong, am I missing some important detail?
2) Am I asking for something impossible?
3) Is it expected behaviour, that --squash adds a different set of
text changes than a pull without squash?
Best,
Volkmar