Re: Advice on strategy for "temporary" commits

From: Mark Wooding <mdw@distorted.org.uk>
Date: Mar 8, 2007, 18:02 UTC
Message-ID: <slrnev0jtg.7lh.mdw@metalzone.distorted.org.uk>
In-Reply-To: <e1dab3980703080907v58739287p18bc2797db7d209e@mail.gmail.com>

David Tweed <david.tweed@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> a-----------a-----------a-----------a
>  \          $           $           $
>   \-t---t---t---t---t---t---t---t---t
>
> AIUI neither git-branch nor git-checkout provide
> a way to do this. (Clearly the git datastructures
> can represent this situation, I'm just not sure how
> to ask the tools to do it.)

You want the raw git-commit-tree tool. Suppose your branches are tmp and hourly (both in refs/heads). Something like this should make your hourly commit:

	commit=$(
	  echo hourly-commit |
	  git commit-tree refs/heads/tmp^{tree} -p refs/heads/hourly)
	git update-ref -m "hourly commit" refs/heads/hourly $commit

It might be that you should then start basing your temporary commits on the most recent archive, so you should also

	git update-ref -m "hourly commit" refs/heads/tmp $commit

Then what you'll end up with is something like

a-----------a-----------a-----------a
 \          $\          $\          $
  \-t---t---t \-t---t---t \-t---t---t

Does that seem sane?

-- [mdw]