[Ksummit-discuss] [ANNOUNCE] git-series: track changes to a patch series over time

[Catalin Marinas]

On 29 Jul 2016, at 15:12, Josh Triplett <josh at joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 01:20:12PM +0100, David Howells wrote:
>> Josh Triplett <josh at joshtriplett.org> wrote:
>>> I'd like to announce a project I've been working on for a while.  I sent
>>> this announcement to LKML, but since many people don't subscribe to LKML
>>> directly, and since ksummit-discuss has had several discussions
>>> specifically about patch workflow and development processes, I thought
>>> I'd send the announcement here as well, in case anyone found it useful
>>> for their workflow.
>> 
>> Can this be used as a direct substitute for stgit for maintaining a patch
>> series?
> 
> Yes, that's exactly what I designed it for.  git-series has the added
> advantage of tracking the versions of the patch series across rewrites.
> stgit just directly rewrites history, like rebase -i does; as far as I
> know, it doesn't remember the old history.  You'd have to go to the
> reflog for that.  

I haven't looked at git-series yet (I actually have a git "series" alias 
to list the current commits against a parent/tracking branch) 
but StGit does remember the series history. It stores all the past states 
of a series in a <branch>.stgit branch and you can inspect the 
changes, get unlimited undo/redo, even show a diff of diffs for 
a given patch. 

> Note that git-series doesn't provide a quilt-style push/pop workflow,
> with applied and unapplied patches; it just looks at HEAD.

Even though I'm the original author of StGit, I find myself using it less 
and less these days as I'm busier integrating others' patches than 
creating my own series from scratch. But what I miss though in plain git is the patch "pop" functionality. At 
some point I may add a 'git stash head' feature to git which 
would stash away the HEAD commit without losing its content (and 
the corresponding 'git stash apply' restoring the original commit). 

-- 
Catalin