Re: git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter

From: James Sadler <freshtonic@gmail.com>
Date: May 10, 2008, 03:31 UTC
Message-ID: <e5e204700805092031m14c3d6c2kb85b51af5a1ee8f7@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20080509080039.GA15393@sigill.intra.peff.net>

2008/5/9 Jeff King <peff@peff.net>:

Show 43 quoted lines

> On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 05:38:12PM +1000, James Sadler wrote:
>
>> I originally tried --subdirectory-filter by itself to see if it would
>> do the job, but it filtered more commits than I thought it should
>> (some commits that touched the subdir were missing after filter-branch
>> was run).
>>
>> I then began to question my understanding of the semantics of
>> subdirectory-filter.
>>
>> Is it meant to:
>> A) Only keep commits where ALL of the changes in the commit only touch
>> content under $DIR?
>> B) Only keep commits where SOME of the changes in the commit touch
>> content under $DIR?
>>
>> I suspected that it was behaving as A.
>
> My understanding is that it should behave as B. E.g.:
>
>  git init
>  mkdir subdir1 subdir2
>  echo content 1 >subdir1/file
>  echo content 2 >subdir2/file
>  git add .
>  git commit -m initial
>  echo changes 1 >>subdir1/file
>  git commit -a -m 'only one'
>  echo more changes 1 >>subdir1/file
>  echo more changes 2 >>subdir2/file
>  git commit -a -m 'both'
>  git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter subdir1
>  git log --name-status --pretty=oneline
>
> should show something like:
>
>  b119e21829b6039aa8fe938fb0304a9a7436b84d both
>  M       file
>  db2ad8e702f36a1df99dd529aa594e756010b191 only one
>  M       file
>  dacb4c2536e61c18079bcc73ea81fa0fb139c097 initial
>  A       file
>

Behaving as B is definitely the desired behaviour, but I am not observing that. I'll see if I can create a test case to demonstrate. Unfortunately, I don't have the right to distribute our repo so will have to attempt to reproduce the problem another way.

Does anybody have a script that can take an existing repo, and create a new one with garbled-but-equivalent commits? i.e. file and directory structure is same with names changed, and there is a one-one relationship between lines of text in new repo and old one except the lines have been scrambled? It would be a useful tool for distributing private repositories for debugging reasons.

> IOW, all commits touch subdir1/file, which becomes just 'file'.
>
> It could be a bug in git-filter-branch. What version of git are you
> using?

I am using git version 1.5.5

>
> -Peff
>

-- 
James