From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2012 22:42:49 GMT
Subject: Re: erratic behavior commit --allow-empty
Message-ID: <74938A94D25C4F1887F30C281A02B35F@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <CAB9Jk9CiDNNBM9V-VvwCK6q-N0JNwEbf4vJj0ffT82iLnrUwog@mail.gmail.com>

From: "Angelo Borsotti" <angelo.borsotti@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2012 11:09 PM

>>
>> A reasonable solution. You can also create a sentinel (--root) commit
>> for
>> any time that you need to create the source branch, just so it (the
>> real
>> source code commit) has a different parent when on source branch to
>> that on
>> the binaries branch.
>
> Do you mean I could create an empty root commit to be used as parent
> for the
> real source commit? Or that there is some --root option to be used?

I was using "--root" in a colloquial way. It is used in some other
commands when the very first commit is to be included in its operation.

At the point where you do the 'git checkout --orphan  <new_branch>
<start_point>' you could have separate start points ready for the source
branch and the binaries branch, and immediately do a 'git commit' to
create the unique sentinel commit before you re-checkout the developers
latest and greatest (with --force), and then do your commits on the 
source branch as before.

Another technique could be to simply switch to the sources branch, and 
then use a 'git clean -x' with an updated .gitignore ('reset' the file 
from the source branch)[or use the exclude file] to remove those now 
ignored binaries, before doing the commit.

Philip