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Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2016 18:37:22 +0100
From: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
To: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
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Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [ANNOUNCE] git-series: track changes to a
 patch series over time
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On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 01:46:23PM -1000, Josh Triplett wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 05, 2016 at 12:46:47AM +0200, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On 29 Jul 2016, at 15:12, Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 01:20:12PM +0100, David Howells wrote:
> > >> Josh Triplett <josh@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. 
> 
> Interesting!  I didn't find that when I last looked at stgit.  Does the
> format used on that branch have documentation anywhere?  I didn't find
> any in the stgit source or manpages.

It is documented in stgit/lib/log.py (or if you generate the docs from
the source files). It is relatively simple, a 'meta' file with details
about the applied/unapplied/hidden patches with the name and commit id
and a patches directory with the actual diffs. The latter are not needed
for patch operations like reordering since git only needs a commit id
but you can use it to easily do a diff of diffs.

BTW, the stgit metadata is normally meant to be accessed via stgit
commands but you can always checkout <branch>.stgit. Long time ago I had
a plan to make stgit more useful for collaborating between multiple
people working on a set of patches but I can't find enough spare time
these days.

-- 
Catalin