Re: sending changesets from the middle of a git tree

[Ryan Anderson <ryan@michonline.com>]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2005 at 10:35:50PM -0500, Steve French wrote:
> Just to confirm a recent answer to questions on lkml ...
> 
> 1) There is no way to send a particular changeset from the "middle" of a 
> set from one tree to another, without exporting it as a patch or 
> rebuilding a new git tree.   I have two changesets that, after testing 
> last week, I now consider more important to send upstream than the few 
> earlier and later changesets.   If I export those two changesets as 
> patches, and send them on. presumably I lose the changset comments etc. 
> and then when the upstream tree is merged back, it might look a little 
> odd in the changeset history.

You can keep most of the metadata you want with "git format-patch".

Extract the changes you need, mail them off.

When you later merge things back together, it should be a trivial merge,
hopefully.

> 2) There is no way to update the comment field of a changeset after it 
> goes in (e.g. to add a bugzilla bug number for a bug that was opened 
> just after the fix went in).

No, a commit is immutable.  You can use "git format-patch" to rebase things if
you need.  I prefer to use "git format-patch --mbox", edit what I need
to, then use git-applymbox to rebase it all against a clean tree.

> 3) There is no way to do a test commit of an individual changeset 
> against a specified tree (to make sure it would still merge cleanly, 
> automatically).

Not sure on this one - in this case, it almost sounds like you want the
feature set of StGit, and/or quilt.  (If "quilt push" succeeds, clearly
it still merges cleanly.)


-- 

Ryan Anderson
  sometimes Pug Majere