Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

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

On Sun, 17 Jan 2010, Thomas Adam wrote:
> > I don't know any way to make gitk display
> > cherry-picked merges.  Instead of the line that gitk draws from a commit
> 
> That's going to be tricky because when you cherry-pick you get a completely
> *new* commit.  "git patch-id" should be able to tell you if two different
> commits are effectively the same.

That touches on the heart of the problem.  As far as I am aware, git
simply doesn't have any way of storing the kind of metadata that is
needed to track cherry-picked merges.  It would need a way of saying
"the tree in this commit is based on the tree in the previous commit
in my branch, plus the changes between commits X and Y in that other
branch".

> > [for example] I'd like to see a line from a chageset on the source
> > branch to a commit on the target branch (to mean that a particular
> > changeset has been merged from the source branch to the target
> > branch).
>
> I think what you're describing here is the operation that "git cherry"
> provides, but there's no provision for such a thing in gitk.

Yes, but "git cherry" analyses file contents or diffs to figure out
which changesets have previously been cherry-picked from one branch to
another, because AFAIK the relevant metadata just doesn't exist.

--apb (Alan Barrett)