Re: git versus CVS (versus bk)

Joel Becker <Joel.Becker@oracle.com> writes:

OK. Consolidating two or more patches into one is something I have done too, but I never felt need for tool support, so that's probably why I misunderstood you.

After extracting a sequence of the dirty commits using git-format-patch, I would say:

	for i in 0*.txt; do git-apply --index $i; done

to bring my tree up to date, and then just say "git commit".

Typically when I do this, I have one "significant" commit among them, usually early in the series, which is followed by smaller "fix this, fix that, oops fix that too" commits. So I edit the log message using the log of the significant commit, and add some missing bits.

I guess another way to do it without even first extracting them as patches would be:

        $ git checkout -b mytopic master
        $ work work work, commit commit commit.
        $ git checkout master
        $ git-read-tree -m -u master mytopic
        $ git-commit -c <that-significant-commit-in-mytopic-branch>

If you want a tool support for this workflow, probably the last two could be somewhat automated. But what would the user input for that be? You need to tell what tree shape you want the after-commit tree to be in, and where you would want the bulk of your commit message to come from.

One possibility.

        $ git-squash-pick mytopic

would be something like this:

	#!/bin/sh
        #
        git-read-tree -m -u HEAD "$1"
        git log HEAD.."$1" >.tmp-commit
        git-commit -F .tmp-commit -e

Your commit-log edit buffer would start with the concatenation of all the commit logs in that throwaway history, and hopefully you would mostly need to delete lines and move some parts around before committing. I do not know how useful this kind of specialized tool would be, though...

Splitting and merging patches into logical steps is something I dream of to be automated, but I do not know how (nor even if it is possible) offhand. Sometimes, when you want truly logical steps, you would end up needing intermediate steps that never existed in your true history (i.e. "in the hindsight, my development should have progressed in these steps.")