Re: v2.6.11 tag in kernel tree

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Nov 30, 2006, 16:04 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0611300758290.3513@woody.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <9e4733910611292002o289dc4d1u7bde2d457fa97d73@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Jon Smirl wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> Using this tree
> git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6
> 
> These two tags appear to be pointing to a tree instead of a commit.
> v2.6.11
> v2.6.11-tree

Yes. We don't have that as a commit. The commit history starts with v2.6.12-rc2.

> I'm trying to check out v2.6.11 so that I can figure out the changes a
> vendor made to it.

You can't check it out, since it's not a commit, but since it is a tree, you can:

 - use it as a base for "git diff"

	git diff v2.6.11 <any-commit-goes-here>

 - or if you want to use it as a base for development, create a new commit 
   and branch from it:

	git-commit-tree v2.6.11 <<EOF
	This is an initial commit starting at the state of Linux-v2.6.11
	EOF

   and then you can take the resulting SHA1 (that it wrote out to stdout), 
   and do

	git checkout -b my-new-branch <sha1thatyoujustgot>

However, whatever you do, it won't be connected to the rest of the git history.

Another possibility may be to get the historical Linux tree (which _does_ have a real v2.6.11, and that you _can_ graft together with the current tree, and thus get full history), and then use that grafted whole-history tree for whatever you want to do. That allows you to do things like rebasing the end result (if you started a new branch based on 2.6.11) etc, since it's now all connected.