workflow question

I'm still trying to figure out how to adapt my workflow to git or git to my workflow, and I've come up with yet another question or two...

I tend to work detached from our central SVN server, and I'm attracted to the fact that I can work on my laptop, commit changes as I go along, and later synchronize them back to the server.

On my current project, I am sole developer (at present) and the central SVN server serves primarly as an off-site backup and historical archive.

Enough of the setup, here are the questions...

1) I would like to make a (git) branch on which I can commit
hourly/daily/periodically as I add in a new feature (so that I can
roll back to the "Gee, I thought it was behaving yesterday -- what
does that code look like?" commit when I need to), but I don't want to
send all of the "commit as of 12:32 on Thursday" commits back to the
SVN server when I'm done.  Do I want to use a "squash" merge to merge
my changes back to the master branch before I synchronize with the
subversion server?  Or do I use the "--no-commit" option to merge?  Or
do I try something else?  The first/last time I tried this, I ended up
with a fast-forward merge back into master, which included all of my
stupid little commit messages.  I would rather one commit message that
read "Added XYZ feature".

2) When I don't fork a branch, and I don't commit until I've completed
the particular feature I'm working on, I can get a fairly good idea of
where I am and what I was doing last (which might be 5-7 days ago,
given high priority interrupts on other projects, summer vacations,
etc...) just by running a "git status".  I see that there are 7 new
files, and 2 modified files.  I know that, when I fork my branch, I
can use "git diff master" to see what's different between my branch
and the master, but then I get the diff of all of the changes as well,
which is too much information.  "git diff --name-only" and "git diff
--summary" are closer, but I can't tell what's been added vs. what's
been changed.  Any suggestions?

As an aside, is there an undocumented option to "git status" to produce a less verbose report of what's been changed and what's not checked in? Perhaps a single line per file with a one or two letter indication of the status of the file followed by the name? If not, would there be any violent objections to my submitting a patch to add such a feature?

That's enough for now.  Thanks for reading this far :-)

--wpd

On 7/24/07, Patrick Doyle <wpdster@gmail.com> wrote:

this is a confusing sentence: "fork" does not happen as an explicit operation (if at all). You just commit somewhere and depending on how you look at the history you either see or not see a "fork".

"git log -p ..master", or even simpler "gitk ..master"

my_status() {
  git diff --cached --name-status -r -M -C HEAD -- "$@" && \
  git diff --name-status -r -M -C -- "$@"
}

Use as: my_status [pathname-limiter]. Does not show untracked files, though.

On 7/24/07, Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com> wrote:

ok, I probably should have said, "When I don't create a branch, and when I have not yet committed any changes for the particular feature..."

I was hoping for something less verbose than a diff or a patch file -- something that just listed what has changed -- I'll have to investigate whether your "my_status()" macro provides the information for which I was looking -- thanks for the pointer.

And, as for gitk, there is something about the combination of the screen on my laptop, my Linux installation (FC6), my X server configuration, and/or me that makes the fonts totally unreadable. I keep meaning to follow up on that, but I'm stuck in a chicken-and-the-egg situation. I don't see the utility of gitk because I can't read the display that it produces. I don't look for the time to fix the display that it produces because, thus far, I don't see the utility of gitk. Sigh...

Ahhh... I was looking around git-status instead of git-diff. That makes sense now that you mention it. Someday I may have the intuitive understanding of git that would point me in that direction myself, but I ain't there yet :-)

Thanks.

--wpd

On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, Patrick Doyle wrote:

"git log --stat ..master" perhaps?

Julian Phillips, Tue, Jul 24, 2007 18:35:15 +0200:

yep. Or just use the same options as with diff:

    $ git log -r --name-status -M -C ..master

Patrick Doyle, Tue, Jul 24, 2007 18:30:12 +0200:

That's a real pity, because it is very powerful.

Try removing ~/.gitk, or look into it and try changing the font. Here is mine, for reference:

set mainfont {Helvetica 11} set textfont {Courier 11} set uifont {Helvetica 9 bold} set tabstop 8 set findmergefiles 0 set maxgraphpct 50 set maxwidth 16 set cmitmode patch set wrapcomment none set showneartags 1 set showlocalchanges 1 set bgcolor white set fgcolor black set colors {green red blue magenta darkgrey brown orange} set diffcolors {red "#00a000" blue} set selectbgcolor gray85 set geometry(main) 1005x850+1417+41 set geometry(topwidth) 1001 set geometry(topheight) 458 set geometry(pwsash0) "684 2" set geometry(pwsash1) "878 2" set geometry(botwidth) 725 set geometry(botheight) 372 set permviews {}

On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 10:57:02PM +0200, Alex Riesen wrote:

(Also, as a quick fix, note that ctrl-- and ctrl-= will adjust the font size down or up (respectively).)

--b.

On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

Side note: this can be *really* confusing on non-US keyboards.

The "=" makes sense on a US keyboard, because it's really "ctrl-+" without the added need to press "shift".

On many non-US keyboards, there is no such arrangement of +/= on the keyboard.

So on a Finnish keyboard, for example, the sequence to make the fonts smaller is "ctrl--", but the sequence to make them larger is "contr-shift-0". Which makes *no* sense what-so-ever, but the "=" sign is "shift-0".

Oh, well. On a Finnish keyboard, "ctrl-+" would make tons of sense. I always try it, and am frustrated when it doesn't work.

			Linus