Re: StGit metadata grabbing with git clone

From: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Date: Nov 23, 2006, 10:47 UTC
Message-ID: <tnxslgawic2.fsf@arm.com>
In-Reply-To: <87ac2jwutu.fsf@neumann.lab.ossystems.com.br>

Otavio Salvador <otavio@debian.org> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> I'm a happy user of stgit together with git to maintain a patch queue
> while I or the company team is working on patches that will be send
> for merging. Both works great but we're having troubles when we try to
> clone a stgit repository.
>
> When I clone the repository it grab the source but it loses the
> metadata. I would like to grab those too. Does anybody has a solution
> or a trick how I can do that?

Most of the StGIT metadata can be generated by "uncommit" (the reason I still keep a lot of this metadata like author etc. is for speed). However, I'm not sure how well this would work since you can nor synchronise the patches afterwards. StGIT works well for sharing patches via e-mail but you might want to consider topic branches instead of patches (though StGIT seems more convenient).

Another idea is to export the patches (stg export) to a common place and import them in the other tree (stg import --series --replace). I could also add a --sync option to "import", instead of --replace, which would perform a three-way merge with the coresponding local patches so that it grabs any additional changes in both repositories or branches (similar to "pick --fold", option which I added for the same reason).

Yet another idea is a "stg import" command for remote repositories or branches which would bring in the StGIT metadata.

At the bottom of the TODO list is something that would solve this, only that I've never found the time to think about it properly. I work on several branches (and even separate trees) and share patches between them. It would be nice to be able to synchronise the changes to these patches.