Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010, David Holland wrote:
> Sure, you can commit subtrees. But if I commit sh, then commit sail,
> then commit sh again, I need to use branches to avoid having the sail
> commit depend on (and thus become inseparable from without a pile of
> additional hassle) the sh commit. Using branches is fairly cheap, but
> it's not free, it offers a lot of new ways to make mistakes, and it
> makes it harder to keep track of all the half-finished things you have
> in progress at once.

I use a separate branch in git for each little thing, and find that
the "git branch" command is good at reminding me of the names of all
the branches.  What I find difficult is creating a working copy that
logically includes the changes from several branches -- this is more or
less equivalent to creating a new branch, merging several other branches
into it, and not committing the result of the merge.

> Well, yes, that's the issue, isn't it? The point is to keep the local
> patches separate, and you haven't provided a means for doing that
> other than "eliminate dependencies on your patches".

topgit and stgit are supposed to be able to help with that, but I didn't
like them (for reasons which I have forgotten).  You can also manage
local patches with "git stash", but I have no experience with trying to
do that with more than one stash at the same time.

--apb (Alan Barrett)