Re: simple cvs-like git wrapper

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Feb 1, 2008, 13:25 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LSU.1.00.0802011318590.7372@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <1201871157.D6625E4@ea26.dngr.org>

Hi,

On Fri, 1 Feb 2008, Kate Rhodes wrote:

> I'm leaning towards agreement with Shawn that you're a little confused 
> as to how syncing works or you're not adequately expressing what you're 
> really hoping for and why git isn't doing it and we're misunderstanding 
> you.

Well, the thing is: git (plumbing) does not really care about syncing and how that works. The core of git is "just" a very clever object database, geared towards revision control.

So in theory, Ed could just go and write a porcelain for git, which does _exactly_ what he wants, yet would be mostly interoperable with other git porcelains.

I imagine that the "cvsish update" would boil down to fetching upstream, updating the index with what the user has in the working directory (something like "git add -u"), then write out a tree from that, and call merge-recursive on that tree and the upstream's current tree. Force fast forward master, but keep the index, keeping the error output of merge-recursive. Done.

However, you need to understand the internals of git enough to do that. Especially the conflict management, and its relation with the index.

And I cannot see how that understanding would not lead to abandoning that work-flow as suboptimal. But hey, that's just my private opinion.

Ciao, Dscho