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Re: tracking a tree that doesn't progress linearly

From
CMCatalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@gmail.com>
Date
Nov 11, 2005, 10:40 UTC
Message-ID
<tnxwtjfxyau.fsf@arm.com>
In-Reply-To
<17268.3463.252020.591687@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> wrote:
Show 6 quoted lines
> I want to be able to publish a git tree for others to follow but I
> also want to be retain the freedom to remove commits and/or rebase
> commits in the tree.  For example, if someone sends me a patch and I
> put it in the tree, then they send me a revised version, I want to be
> able to roll back to just before I applied the older patch and start
> again from there.

I'm facing a similar problem. I use StGIT for my development branch (usually with less than 20 patches) but I would like to export a HEAD for others to pull from. When rebasing the patches with StGIT, the new HEAD wouldn't be a descendant of the old one.

The partial solution I got to was to make the master branch available to people and the devel branch private. Initially, the master branch would pick the patches ('stg pick') from the devel branch which I want to make public. When I'm happy with the patches on the master branch, I run 'stg commit' and store them permanently (you won't be able to modify them). After permanently storing the patches, I can use the master branch in the normal way with GIT (merge, pull, push etc.).

When I get a patch in the devel branch updated, I just run 'stg pick patchname@devel' in the master branch. Because of the nature of the three-way merge, the new picked patch should only contain the differences from the previous one. It might also cause conflicts which need resolving if the new patch modifies lines which were present in the old patch (i.e. not only additions or removals). At this point you can change the patch description since the new picked patch only represents an update to the old one and not the full feature.

The only little drawback I see with this approach is that merging in the latest changes from the mainline kernel could produce identical conflicts (if any) in both master and devel branches.

-- 
Catalin
Previous: Martin LanghoffNext: Petr Baudis
Message 3 of 4 in “tracking a tree that doesn't progress linearly”
  1. Paul MackerrasNov 11, 2005
  2. Martin LanghoffNov 11, 2005
  3. Catalin MarinasNov 11, 2005
  4. Petr BaudisNov 11, 2005

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