Re: Git fork removal?

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Apr 28, 2005, 02:47 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0504272221030.30848-100000@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050428021237.GA8612@pasky.ji.cz>

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Petr Baudis wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Dear diary, on Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 03:31:18AM CEST, I got a letter
> where Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org> told me that...
> > I saw that "fork" was removed when going to the cg- scripts, and the
> > replacements don't do the symlinked trees thing. I found the symlinked
> > trees thing vital to my workflow, so I'm going to want to reintroduce
> > them, or something similar. Is there some reason you went to hardlinked
> > object files instead of symlinked directories?
> 
> The user. ;-)
> 
> Apparently, too many people were confused by the local/remote branches
> distinctions, and even I ceased to like it gradually (BTW, Cogito still
> supports working with them - it just does not offer any interface for
> manipulation with them). The current scheme is much simpler and I
> believe more clear.

I don't really like having local branches and remote repositories be treated the same. But I like each of them being available concepts separately.

> Also, the forked repositories were not truly independent - people
> actually got burnt by forking and then removing the original repository.

Ah, okay. I'm actually personally using a original repository called "REPOSITORY" without a head or anything, with symlinks to that, so I don't worry about accidentally killing the real thing from some branch. I've really got a storage area per project, plus a set of links and tracking stuff for each fork. I also back up the REPOSITORY on occasion, particularly if I'm about to do something potentially destructive to the database (like git-prune-script or convert-cache). I structure my filesystem like:

  /working
    ... other projects
    /git
      /REPOSITORY (with only .git, non-symlink version)
      /linus
      /pasky
      /barkalow
      /cog-barkalow
      /diff
      ...

> If this breaks your workflow, could you please describe it? Perhaps we
> could find a good semantics to support both.

The part that I'm worried about is the way I turn a mass of debugging and little local commits into a clean patch series. I've got a working fork "barkalow", which is the result of a bunch of stuff and a dozen commits. It is derived from "linus". I want to split up the changes and make a series of commits, each of which will be a patch to submit.

1) I fork "linus" into "for-linus". I go into "for-linus".

2) I do "git diff this:barkalow > patch". This gives me the complete set
   of changes I want to submit.

3) I cut down the diff to a single logical change by removing all of the
   other hunks.

4) I do "git apply < patch". I do "git commit". I describe the logical
   change.

5) I go back to step 2, unless I'm done.

6) For each of the commits between "linus" and "for-linus", I do 
   "git patch <commit>", and send out the result.

The thing that I think requires the symlinks is step 2, which requires that there be somewhere I can run git and have it able to see a pair of unrelated local heads and the relevant trees.

	-Daniel
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