Re: Generating patches/Cherry Picking for a large number of commits

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 28, 2009, 22:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7vmy5jh8oa.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <ae09c2a40908281250r42275a3o96825b89e725bace@mail.gmail.com>

Alydis <alydis@august8.net> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Ack!  Embarrassing RTFM.
>
> While I have your attention, however, I noticed that git am <path>
> will apply the list patches generated by format-patch.  The
> documentation said something about mbox/maildir directories, which I
> actually am not that familiar with.  Is it safe to say that git am
> <path> will read the path and apply patches in numerical order?  Does
> it allow skipping?

If you say "git am <directory>/*", like you have in your original message shown *below* (sheesh, why am I responding to somebody who top-posts?), you let your shell perform a numerical sort, so you would be Ok.

>>> git format-patch -o patches v2.6.21..v2.6.30 arch/powerpc/boot
>>> git am -3 patches/*

I do not think the above format-patch, even with --full-diff, is necessarily a good idea nor would work in general.

Often, when a series is concocted, you would see this pattern:

 * Early parts of the patch series to lay groundwork by introducing non
   platform specific infrastructure; and then

 * Later parts of the series utilizes the infrastructure to implement the
   feature for particular platforms.

Obviously you are interested only for powerpc parts in the latter category and would want to omit anything irrelevant to powerpc. But you do want to include all of the former class, even if they do not touch anything inside the powerpc area.