Re: making stgit handle being rebased by git rebase

[Karl Wiberg <kha@treskal.com>]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Catalin Marinas
<catalin.marinas@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11 November 2010 10:29, Karl Wiberg <kha@treskal.com> wrote:
>
>> I've thought a bit about this in the past, and the best solution I
>> could come up with is of the first kind, and would change the
>> representation of applied patches to use just two refs: the branch
>> itself, and the stack base ref. I think git rebase wouldn't wreck
>> things for that representation.
>
> git rebase would most likely change the base of the stack so stgit
> can no longer track its patches.

I was thinking we could use another git branch as stack
base---specifically, use origin/master as stack base for master, etc.
The stack of applied patches would then be defined as
origin/master..master. That way, git rebase really wouldn't do any
harm.

Of course, if git rebase was used to rebase onto a different branch,
then StGit would have to be told about it; but git already stores
information of this sort, used by e.g. git pull with no arguments.
(No, I haven't researched this part properly. )

> Maybe a better option for stgit is to just remember the branch and
> the number of patches (probably including the patch names unless we
> always generate them automatically, not that bad but you lose the
> possibility of renaming patches).

Yes, that's another way to do it. I think I like my proposal better,
but as I said, I haven't worked it out in detail, and I'm not about to
do so any time soon.

> The above would work well if people use git commit on top of an
> stgit branch.

That goes for my proposal as well.

> The patch names maybe be wrongly associated or (if we automatically
> generate patch names) we may miss the first patch in the series
> because of the number of commits. The latter is not that bad since
> we can always use stg uncommit, though a stg rebase could override
> the committed patch.

Patch names are a problem in all these "minimal metadata for applied
patches" ideas. They could possibly be preserved by guessing the best
match if the stack is modified outside StGit.

-- 
Karl Wiberg, kha@treskal.com
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