[U-Boot] Question about patches

[Graeme Russ]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 7:52 PM, Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> wrote:
> Dear Graeme Russ,
>
> In message <AANLkTil1Czc80PISUCnoxQK0lVhfTuDbwVNnsoZ9Cc-_ at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
>>
>> I would also recommend looking at 'Stacked Git' (stgit) - It is basically
>> a wrapper around it which allows you to manage a set of patches and move
>> back and forth between them, merge, re-order etc.
>>
>> It makes life a lot easier when you make a mess of things :)
>
> What exactly can stgit do that cannot be done with a number of
> branches and "git rebase -i" ?  [Sorry for the stupid question, but I
> haven't used stgit yet...]
>

Probably nothing, but it is more straightforward

Lets say you are working on a branch, say 'Testing'

git checkout testing
stg new (opens an editor, allows you to write up a commit message)
edit
stg refresh
stg new / edit / stg refresh (as many as you like)

Now you will have a bunch of commits, but maybe they are in the wrong order

eg

[arch commit 1]
[common commit 1]
[arch commit 2]
[board commin 1]
[arch commit 3]

etc, etc

you can then use stg pop/push/merge to re-arrange and merge commits
together to get them in a more logical arrangement before submitting

Sometimes when I'm in the middle of a very long development session I tend
to end up with one 'big patch' which has multiple logical change units. In
this case, you can pop the 'big patch', insert a new smaller patch
implementing some of the 'big patch' then when you push the 'big patch',
all the duplicate changes are stripped. So you can basically whittle down
a big, complex commit into multiple smaller commits very easily.

I'm sure you'll argue that this is poor development management, but I
find myself more efficient if a 'get in the zone' and then go back and
break things up. It also serves as a really good self imposed code review

It also has some inter-branch managment commands I have never used

Regards,

Graeme