Re: unseeking?

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Apr 24, 2005, 18:47 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0504241418190.30848-100000@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050424180116.GC11094@tumblerings.org>

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Zack Brown wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> That works a little better for me, but neither really works. If I do
> 
> git fork currdir newdir
> 
> I get
> 
> cat: .git/HEAD: No such file or directory
> Invalid id: 
> grep: .git/remotes: No such file or directory
> /home/zbrown/git/git-pasky-0.6.2/gitfork.sh: line 41: .git/heads/mygitdir: No
> such file or directory
> cat: .git/HEAD: No such file or directory
> Invalid id: 
> error: no access to SHA1 file directory
> fatal: invalid cache
> error: no access to SHA1 file directory
> fatal: cache corrupted
> Branch mygitdir ready in mygitdir3 with head

I think your "mygitdir" directory has lost its idea of what's in it, so the fork doesn't know what should be there, either. If it's tracking a remote repository, you should be able to do a "git pull" there to both bring it up to date and fix this. Then things should work better.

Show 5 quoted lines

> I'm sure this is all accurate information, but I'm still unclear about several
> points:
> 
> 1) when I fork directory A into directory B, is A at all different from B
> when the fork completes, and if so, how?

They should be the same, but now independant as far as commits into them.

> 2) Are A and B altered by the forking process? i.e., is this an event that is
> recorded in the repo, or is it just the equivalent of 'checking out' the repo?

The repo contains the latest commit on each side in .git/heads/<name>

> 3) What is the significance of a branch 'name'? Is this like a tag?

It's orthogonal to a tag; it's what stays the same when you do more commits on something. E.g., linux-scsi or linux-stable would be branch names. (Tags, on the other hand, stick where you put them.)

> 4) In normal work-flow, when would forks be created, as opposed to other ways
> of getting a tree?

I have a tree that I want to modify, but I want to keep the original, and I may want to update the original from an upstream source (and then sync my work with it). I start with the original:

  cd original
  git init URL
  git addremote remote-source URL
  git track remote-source

I make my own working directory:

  git fork my-changes ../my-changes
  cd ../my-changes

Then I do my changes, and commit whenever I feel like I've gotten somewhere (or when I think I'm about to mess something up and might want to undo changes). Periodically, I check on the mainline:

  cd ../original
  git pull

I also merge changes from the mainline:

  cd ../my-changes
  git merge remote-source

When I'm done, I make a patch for my work:

  cd ../my-changes
  git patch remote-source

I generally then fork the original again, split the patch, apply each section in the new fork, committing after each one, generate patches for each of these commits, and send those out. Then I discard my old branch and continue from the new one. If, at some point, all of the changes I want to keep have been put into the mainline, I discard all my branches and fork again from the mainline.

(My personal style is to discard the history of how the changes got made in favor of the history of how the changes got into the mainline, since I don't really need to keep all of my debugged mistakes that nobody else saw.)

	-Daniel
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