Re: [RFC] Patches exchange is bad?

From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
Date: Aug 16, 2005, 22:45 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0508161824140.23242@iabervon.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050816220923.42545.qmail@web26301.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Marco Costalba wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Martin Langhoff wrote:
>
> >>From what I understand, you'll want the StGIT infrastructure. If you
> >use git/cogito, there is an underlying  assumption that you'll want
> >all the patches merged across, and a simple cg-update will bring in
> >all the pending stuff.
> >
>
> My concerns are both metodologicals and practical:
>
> 1) Method: To use the 'free patching workflow' on git is something foreseen in
> git design, something coherent with the fork + develop + merge cycle that it
> seems, at least to me, THE way git is meant to be used. Or it is stretching
> the possibility of the tool to something technically allowed but not suggested.

Patches are definitely meant to be part of how git is used; they are the primary way of getting clean history out of messy history (that is, saving a content change while discarding some history that isn't applicable). There's relatively little support in git itself, but that's because the point is to go outside the system's tracking. There have been various discussions of more explicit support, and nobody's been able to come up with a need.

> 2) Practical: The round trip git-format-patch + git-applymbox is the logical and
> natural way to reach this goal or, also in this case, I intend to stretch some tools,
> designed for one thing, for something else?

I'd guess that git-diff-tree + git-apply (without the rest of the scripting) would be more effective when you're not doing anything with the intermediate files, since it saves doing a bunch of formatting and parsing.

	-Daniel
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