Rebase v.s. fast forward

Alan· Feb 17, 2009, 23:50 UTC · lore

I am dealing with a kernel branch of a branch that undergoes frequent rebases and I want to know the easiest way of handling things.

The tree is pulled from kernel.org. Patches are applied to the tree by a developer here on a branch. I take that branch, make my own branch, add drivers and other modifications and publish to a different repo.

Now that 2.6.29 is occurring, every time there is a new RC candidate, he rebases the tree and tells everyone to rebuild. Since the developers on my projects have their own branches off of my tree, rebuilding everything is starting to look like a big pain.

Is there a way to take a rebased repository and apply the changes in a manner that does not require reconstructing everything from patches?

Can you fast forward on a rebased repo or are you just hosed? (Or would that be considered "frebasing"?)

Jan Hudec· Feb 22, 2009, 19:00 UTC · re: Alan · lore

Re: Rebase v.s. fast forward

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 15:50:04 -0800, Alan wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> I am dealing with a kernel branch of a branch that undergoes frequent
> rebases and I want to know the easiest way of handling things.
> 
> The tree is pulled from kernel.org. Patches are applied to the tree by a
> developer here on a branch.  I take that branch, make my own branch, add
> drivers and other modifications and publish to a different repo.
> 
> Now that 2.6.29 is occurring, every time there is a new RC candidate, he
> rebases the tree and tells everyone to rebuild.  Since the developers on
> my projects have their own branches off of my tree, rebuilding
> everything is starting to look like a big pain.
> 
> Is there a way to take a rebased repository and apply the changes in a
> manner that does not require reconstructing everything from patches?

No, there is not. When you have some changes on top of rebased branch, you have to rebase them.

> Can you fast forward on a rebased repo or are you just hosed?  (Or would
> that be considered "frebasing"?)

Well, fast-forward condition is when you pull and you have no local changes. Which I guess is not your case.

I am not sure whether pull properly detects the case, where the pulled branch got rebased (so strictly-speaking it's not a fast-forward), but there are no local changes, but since you probably do have some local changes, it would not help you.

-- 
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb@ucw.cz>