Advice on strategy for "temporary" commits

From: David Tweed <david.tweed@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 11, 2007, 05:22 UTC
Message-ID: <e1dab3980703102122i398d1fa5ib4e629d32134f4e4@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <e1dab3980703102101s21401403ja28c6273ecaa7b83@mail.gmail.com>

Show 6 quoted lines

> Try if "git checkout -m" does what you wanted. Or simply
> do a merge of "more often" branch into "less often" branch,
> perhaps simply not recording it as a merge with
> "git merge --squash" followed by "git commit".
>
> By the way, you know that you can --amend a commit?

Jakub suggested primarily being on the temporary branch,
when updating the archival branch is desired to first commit
to the temporary branch, then switch to the archival branch
and do a "git merge --squash temp-branch-name" and commit.
This seems to half-work, in that when it doesn't flag a merge
conflict it does what I want. Unfortunately it often seems to detect
"conflicts" that aren't conflicts for my usage and which make
automatic cron usage impossible, eg,
-------------------------------- 8< -------------------------------
$ git merge --squash temp
 100% (4/4) done
Auto-merged s
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in s
Squash commit -- not updating HEAD
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

$ more s H1 t1 t2 <<<<<<< HEAD:s ======= t4 t5

>>>>>>> temp:s

--------------------------------- 8< ---------------------------- I _think_ if I could specify an opposite of the "ours" merge strategy that always takes file contents from the other branches head commit. An alternative might be to see if I can figure out directly commiting the relevant file tree to both branches using low-level git commands avoiding the higher level git processing (since this isn't really a merge of different development but recording the same "content state" on two different branches maybe trying to make a "merge" work is the wrong idea.)

[In case anyone thinks I'm wrong to want to work primarily from cron jobs, my rationale is that this stuff is personal to me -- ie, won't be independently changed by anyone else -- and isn't a focussed product. Years ago I tried using RCS on my home directory and found I spent lots of time writing contentless commit messages like "save at 11.15 on 05/06/02" and that during crunch periods I'd avoid making check-ins because it was too much extraneous work; but these were _precisely_ the times I'd be most likely to rush and do some stupid changes I'd want to back out, so it didn't really work and so I stopped using RCS. With my "safety net and historical archive" usage pattern -- which is different from productised development -- I really want something safe to run from cron.]

Anyway, thanks for all the help.

-- 
cheers, dave tweed__________________________
david.tweed@gmail.com
Rm 124, School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading.
Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to
see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. -- Stephen Jay Gould