Re: [PATCH 2/2] Add Author and Documentation sections to git-for-each-ref.txt

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 11:33:52PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > Git-cherry sort of does this, but patch-ids miss a lot of cases: patches
> > tweaked in transit, patches applied on a different commit, or even
> > patches taken partially or split up. So I rebase frequently, and as
> > patches get picked up in master, the branches dwindle to empty.
> > Suggestions welcome if anybody else has figured out something clever.
> 
> A solution to string different iterations of the same patch together,
> perhaps using notes as the storage media, that makes it easier to view the
> changes between different iterations?  I think Shawn does something like
> that in Gerrit code review.

I don't necessarily care about different iterations of the patch on my
end. Usually when I discard an old version I don't go back to it, and in
the rare case that I do, it is simple enough to pull it from the reflog
or from the mailing list.

What I mean is lining up what I have locally (and what I send) with what
ends up in your repository. Which can have arbitrary changes from the
original. I don't think there is a general solution. In theory you could
take a single patch of mine, split it into two, then mark up each half.
I know you have the sense not to do this, but there are simpler cases
that still cause problems.

For example, in my recent trace-sifter series, you took some squashes
from other people on the early bits, and those impacted the text of
later bits. So there was no way for patch-id to link up the patches.

Rebasing at least faces me with the conflicts over the rewrite, and I
can manually check each conflict and say "OK, it looks like he took my
patch, but this part had to be rewritten". And then I can either accept
your rewrite (by resolving in favor of you), or I can rework my patch to
do what I think should be done on top of yours, and then submit my new
one on top.

I could also use Jay's suggested "loose patch id", and link things up by
commit author and message. Unless you do something drastic like
splitting a patch in two (or merging two patches into one), then I can
create the correlation. But it makes me a little nervous, because the
content of your version may not be the same as mine. And probably I
should be reviewing it before throwing away my version in favor of
yours.

-Peff