(cogito) Branch offf from older commit?

Is there (in cogito) a way to start a branch off from an older commit?

Assume I receive a patch whichis based on an old version which I want to test first (and resolve problems) in a separate branch.

This was what I tried:

* Clone main repo:
	-> cg-clone /git/u-boot u-boot-testing 
* Identify wanted branch point and seek to it:
	-> cd u-boot-testing
	-> cg-seek 024447b186cca55c2d803ab96b4c8f8674363b86
* Apply patch

Now how to proceed?

I can add new files created by the patch using "cg-add", but cg-status says "Changes recording BLOCKED: seeked from master", and cg-commit says "committing blocked: seeked from master", too.

However, when I now seek back I get this:

	-> cg-seek
	Warning: uncommitted local changes, trying to bring them along

which then results in a couple of conflicts which are probably to be expected.

So I tried this (after throwing away and re-creating my cloned repo):

* Uncommit the commit following the one I want to keep:
	-> cg-admin-uncommit 342717f72a2f92a14b9c823546e5bcec244f8bf4
	-> cg-reset
* cg-status reports a couple of unknown files (those added later to
  the tree); I manually removed these
* Apply patch
* Check in modifications
* Clone another tree
	-> cg-clone /git/u-boot u-boot-test-merge
	-> cd u-boot-test-merge
* Create branch for the stuff to be tested
	-> cg-branch-add testing-NAND /work/u-boot-testing
* Pull and merge:
	-> cg-pull testing-NAND
	-> cg-merge testing-NAND

This works as intended, but seems to be a bit circuitous to me; I think this is probably a pretty common situation and there might be a simpler approach which I am missing?

[If possible I'd like to use cogito only, but if there is a clever way to do this using git-core commands I'm interested, too.]

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Wolfgang Denk wrote:

You should be able to just use the git commands, and cogito should be perfectly happy.

IOW, if you do

	git checkout -b newbranch <starting-point-sha1>

you'll switch to a "newbranch" that was created at the starting point, and as far as I can tell, this is all very cogito-friendly indeed. So now you can work in that "newbranch" - commit things, do anything you want, and all with cogito (ie it's only this one raw git command you need to set things up, after that you're back in cogito-land).

You can switch back with "git checkout master" (again, I don't think cogito does the local git branches yet, but once you've switched back you're golden), and if you're in the "master" branch, you can merge with your new-branch with

	git resolve master newbranch "Merge my work on xyz"

or similar.

And always remember "gitk --all", since that's a very useful thing to visualize where you are.

No, cg-seek doesn't start a new branch, so the result is "locked". You can't commit on top of the seek-point, because the branch you are in already _has_ a child of that point.

(Actually, these days cg-seek does use a fixed local git branch for the seek target, so that's not _technically_ true any more. I suspect Pasky is working on exposing the general local branch interfaces)

		Linus