Re: Submit/Workflow question

From: Jason Sewall <jasonsewall@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 29, 2007, 17:21 UTC
Message-ID: <31e9dd080707291021y5fd258ccobc4fa30e23a9880a@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <85abtfw6d5.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On 7/29/07, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>
> Suppose that I have created a half-baked patch A suiting my personal
> needs and went on from there, having something like
>
> ...->A->B->...
>
> Now at some point of time I decide that really A should be made fit
> for submission.

What I do in this sort of situation varies on how good I was about keeping A and B "independent"; first of all, let's assume you're not on 'master', you're on 'some-feature' (and if you weren't, it's easy to make it a branch, tho you might have to rebase the branch to the point on master where the patch is meaningful to others, and optionally rewind master to keep it clean)

some-feature:         A->B->...
                     /
master:  ->W->X->Y->Z

If I really want to edit *just* A and not use any of B at all, then the excellent rebase -i would do the job - you may want to rebase to Z, or if A weren't the first commit exclusive to your branch, you could rebase to whatever that is...

The point is that rebase -i will let you say "edit just A, just apply B afterwards" and it will rewrite history for you after you fix A, and then it will try to apply B on top of A, and so on until you're done.

Sometimes, rebase -i doesn't cut it for me, (because I didn't make my commits cleanly separated, or perhaps because I haven't totally explored rebase) - then I do it the "old-fashioned way" which it the way this was usually done before rebase -i. I make a temporary branch off of master called (apply-some-feature) and I start generating diffs between this new branch and some-feature. A apply them, sometimes reaching across commits and so forth, and commit the changes in nice, clean format. When I'm done, *I* usually merge these onto master (if its my own project) but if you were going to make it into a patch, I would probably just replace some-feature with apply-some-feature.

It's probably pretty self-evident, but (git) diff (and some sort of visual patch-applier) is pretty powerful and you can generate very "narrow" diffs to look at just the parts you want to for a given step in this process. And of course, you can use to to make sure that at the end, apply-some-feature and some-feature's HEADS have the same tree (or not, if you chose to omit some debugging stuff as I often do).

By the way, the way Bruce suggested was fine too, I just though I'd share what I do in this sort of situation (and I do it often because I always forget to make my commits clean the first time)

Jason