Re: [RFC] Applying a graft to a tree and "rippling" the changes through

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Nov 20, 2005, 01:24 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0511200217200.11653@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <pan.2005.11.19.17.23.17.920228@smurf.noris.de>

Hi,

On Sat, 19 Nov 2005, Matthias Urlichs wrote:

> [...] What can you do with such a thing that you cannot do now, just as 
> easily, besides slow down your programs with an unnecessary level of 
> indirection?

I tend to agree. In fact, if I would like to introduce earlier history (for the sake of archeology or whatever), I would import the earlier history into git, possibly finding the best match in the current development branch (for example, when the original project continued for a while to be tracked in CVS), and then make a merge between these two.

Then, I'd merge the new development's HEAD, and it would be fine:

ORIG1 .. ORIG2 .. .. ORIG_HEAD
                         |
                         |   GIT1 .. GIT2 .. .. GIT_HEAD
                         |   /                    /
                         | /                     /
                      UNIFYING_MERGE           /
                                   \         /
                                     \     /
                               NEW_HEAD_FOR_ARCHEOLOGICAL_PURPOSES

Where ORIG_HEAD's tree is identical with GIT1's tree. The resulting branch would serve every research purpose I can think of (just be sure not to use "-m" with git-whatchanged).

Ciao, Dscho