Re: git versus CVS (versus bk)

From: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 1, 2005, 13:25 UTC
Message-ID: <tnxd5lkwld8.fsf@arm.com>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90510311702wfb43281rf4464a02e8e3be2@mail.gmail.com>

Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On 11/1/05, Joel Becker <Joel.Becker@oracle.com> wrote:
>> > is possible) offhand.  Sometimes, when you want truly logical
>> > steps, you would end up needing intermediate steps that never
>> > existed in your true history (i.e. "in the hindsight, my
>> > development should have progressed in these steps.")
>>
>>         Yes, I always do.  But I'm not talking about that sort of large
>> feature add or whatever.  I'm talking about merely doing something on a
>> small scale, but in a temporary repository.
>
> I'm really surprised that Calalin hasn't chimed in.

Well, it was night here when this discussion took off :-).

> If you are into rewriting/merging/splitting your patches, StGIT is
> your friend. Check out: http://www.procode.org/stgit/

StGIT mainly resembles Quilt workflow but there are no patches, only commit objects which are indefinitely replaceable (push/pop/refresh).

What I usually do is create smaller commits for different features and just stack them together. That's usually for features which are dependent on each-other and you can control them with a finer grain than having separate branches. One can push/pop patches (commits) to bring the patch to be modified at the top. After modification, a refresh command would save it as a commit. All the patches (commits) in the stack are accessible via HEAD and are seen as GIT commits.

It may happen to just have a bigger patch which needs splitting. What I usually do in this case is import the patch as an StGIT patch (i.e. GIT commit object), pop it from the stack so that it is no longer applied, split the physical patch (diff file) into smaller, logical changes and apply them one by one with StGIT. When you think al the big patch was completely applied, pushing it should result in an empty patch, otherwise you might have missed something that needs applying.

With StGIT you can also pick a commit object from a different branch as a StGIT patch or you could merge two patches into one.

Once you are OK with the patches in the stack, just ask the gatekeeper to pull the changes from your tree using plain GIT or mail them automatically with StGIT.

-- 
Catalin