Comment by gioele
2 days ago
> The whole patch quilting thing is awful. Just keep the patches as commits.
I'd say that `quilt` the utility is pretty much abandoned at this point. The name `quilt` remains in the format name, but otherwise is not relevant.
Nowadays people that maintain patches do it via `gbp-pq` (the "patch queue" subcommand of the badly named `git-buildpackage` software). `gbp-pq switch` reads the patches stored in `debian/patches/`, creates an ephemeral branch on top of the HEAD, and replays them there. Any change done to this branch (new commits, removed comments, amended commits) are transformed by `gbp-pq export` into a valid set of patches that replaces `debian/patches/`.
This mechanism introduces two extra commands (one to "enter" and one to "exit" the patch-applied view) but it allows Debian to easily maintain a mergeable Git repo with floating patches on top of the upstream sources. That's impossible to do with plain Git and needs extra tools or special workflows even outside of Debian.
> That's impossible to do with plain Git and needs extra tools or special workflows even outside of Debian
Rebase.
Also rebasing has less information available to it, so it's less likely to update cleanly than merging. Don't do it!! Just consider the diff between the new head and upstream as "the diff" and describe the reasons for it.
What, no. In a merge you have two parents and their histories. In a rebase you have... the same thing as-if you had merged a fast-forward-ready branch. It's the same thing.
If you insist you can add Merge commits to bracket fast-forward pushes, but arguably there is no need, and especially so for something like Debian packages where the convention would be that Debian's patches are "always on top", so you can see them by doing `git log ${base}..${debian_release_branch}` for any release. (And what's the base? Whatever upstream branch/tag the Debian release is based on, but you can add more tags with a Debian naming convention to denote the bases.)
2 replies →
What siblings say. What you want is `git rebase`, especially with the `--onto` and `--interactive` options. You might also want something like bisect-rebase.sh[0], though there are several other things like it now.
[0] https://gist.github.com/nicowilliams/ea2fa2b445c2db50d2ee650...
Rebasing would mean there's no continuous versioning of the "patches on top", which might be undesirable. Also, the history rewriting might make cooperation difficult.
Merges would avoid those problems, but are harder to do if there are lots of conflicts, as you can't fix conflicts patch by patch.
Perhaps a workflow based on merges-of-rebases or rebase-and-overwrite-merge would work, but I don't think it's fair to say "oh just rebase".
> Rebasing would mean there's no continuous versioning of the "patches on top", which might be undesirable. Also, the history rewriting might make cooperation difficult.
Let's say you have these version tags upstream: foo-1.0.1, foo-1.1.0, foo-1.3.0, and corresponding Debian releases 1.0.1-0, 1.1.0-0, 1.1.0-1, 1.3.0-0, 1.3.0-1, and 1.3.0-2, and the same 3 patches in all cases, except slightly different in each case. Then to see the several different versions of these patches you'd just `git log --oneline foo-${version}..debian-${version}-${deb_version}`.
Gerrit introduces the concept of Commit-Id; essentially a uuid ties to the first review which merged a proposed commit into the trunk.
Cherry picks preserve that Commit-Id. And so do rebases; because they're just text in a commit message.
So you can track history of patches that way, if you needed to. Which you won't.
(PS some team at google didn't understand git or their true requirements, so they wasted SWE-decades at that point on some rebasing bullshit; I was at least able to help them make it slightly less bad and prevent other teams from copying it)
4 replies →
That’s what git-rebase is for, and it is built into standard git.