Re: Patch (apply) vs. Pull

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jun 22, 2005, 17:21 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0506221009120.2353@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vmzpihi6x.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> Having said that, one automation I would benefit from is to
> automatically find patches that _have_ been accepted and drop
> them from my snapshot pool --- that part should be very easy to
> automate and I have not done so primarily because I _am_ lazy.
> I could call it git-cherry-drop ;-).

Andrew Morton does all of this with quilt, and it ends up being very effective. Of course, the kernel has had almost 15 years of people making it more and more modular, so the kernel really gets rejects very seldom indeed, and it would probably not work as well for other projects (including git) that tend to have tighter couplings, if for no other reason than the fact that they are usually smaller.

Anyway, it's not a trivial problem. You can search for patch matches in the patch history, but the thing is, that will fail whenever a patch was edited for whitespace etc (which does end up happening often enough to matter). The same goes even more for the commit messages (I routinely not only add my sign-off, of course, but also fix typo's I notice and often end up reformatting whitespace).

So at the very least, you'd have to have a fuzzy search (but exact enough that you'd see if a part of a patch was dropped etc).

			Linus