version-controlled at all). But there are several disadvantages -
for one, these tools (especially StGIT) do not actually fit well
with plain Git at all: it is basically impossible to take advantage
-of the index efectively when using StGIT. But more importantly,
+of the index effectively when using StGIT. But more importantly,
these tools horribly fail in the face of distributed environment.
TopGit has been designed around three main tenets:
As mentioned above, the main intended use-case for TopGit is tracking
third-party patches, where each patch is effectively a single topic
-branch. In order to flexibly accomodate even complex scenarios when
+branch. In order to flexibly accommodate even complex scenarios when
you track many patches where many are independent but some depend
on others, TopGit ignores the ancient Quilt heritage of patch series
and instead allows the patches to freely form graphs (DAGs just like
-Git history itself, only "one lever higher"). For now, you have
+Git history itself, only "one level higher"). For now, you have
to manually specify which patches does the current one depend
on, but TopGit might help you with that in the future in a darcs-like
fashion.
After `tg create`, you should insert the patch description
to the '.topmsg' file, which will already contain some
- pre-filled bits. You can set topgit.to, topgit.cc and topgit.bcc
+ prefilled bits. You can set topgit.to, topgit.cc and topgit.bcc
configuration variables in order to have `tg create`
add these headers with given default values to '.topmsg'.
only empty branch (base == head); use '-f' to remove
non-empty branch.
+ The '-f' option is also useful to force removal of a branch's base, if
+ you used 'git branch -D B' to remove the branch B, and then certain
+ TopGit commands complain, because the base of branch B is still there.
+
Currently, this command will _NOT_ remove the branch from
the dependency list in other branches. You need to take
care of this _manually_. This is even more complicated
TODO: '-a' to delete all empty branches, depfix, revert
+tg depend
+~~~~~~~~~
+ Change dependencies of a TopGit-controlled topic branch.
+ This should have several subcommands, but only 'add' is
+ supported right now.
+
+ The 'add' subcommand takes an argument of a topic branch
+ to be added, adds it to '.topdeps', performs a commit and
+ then updates your topic branch accordingly. If you want to
+ do other things related to the dependency addition, like
+ adjusting '.topmsg', prepare them in the index before
+ calling 'tg depend add'.
+
+ TODO: Subcommand for removing dependencies, obviously
+
+tg files
+~~~~~~~~
+ List files changed by the current or specified topic branch.
+
+ Options:
+ -i list files based on index instead of branch
+ -w list files based on working tree instead of branch
+
tg info
~~~~~~~
Show a summary information about the current or specified
tg patch will be able to automatically send the patches by mail
or save them to files. (TODO)
- TODO: tg patch -i to base at index instead of branch,
- -w for working tree
+ Options:
+ -i base patch generation on index instead of branch
+ -w base patch generation on working tree instead of branch
+
+tg mail
+~~~~~~~
+ Send a patch from the current or specified topic branch as
+ email.
+
+ Takes the patch given on the command line and emails it out.
+ Destination addresses such as To, Cc and Bcc are taken from the
+ patch header.
+
+ Since it actually boils down to `git send-email` please refer to
+ its documentation for details on how to setup email for git.
+ You can pass arbitrary options to this command through the
+ '-s' parameter, but you must double-quote everything.
+ The '-r' parameter with msgid can be used to generate in-reply-to
+ and reference headers to an earlier mail.
+
+ Note: be careful when using this command. It easily sends out several
+ mails. You might want to run
+
+ git config sendemail.confirm always
+
+ to let `git send-email` ask for confirmation before sending any mail.
+
+ Options:
+ -i base patch generation on index instead of branch
+ -w base patch generation on working tree instead of branch
+
+ TODO: 'tg mail patchfile' to mail an already exported patch
+ TODO: mailing patch series
+ TODO: specifying additional options and addresses on command
+ line
tg remote
~~~~~~~~~
Register given remote as TopGit-controlled. This will create
the namespace for the remote branch bases and teach 'git fetch'
- and 'git push' to operate on them.
+ and 'git push' to operate on them. (Do NOT use 'git push --all'
+ for your pushes - plain 'git push' will do the right thing.)
- It takes a mandatory remote name argument, and optional
+ It takes a optional remote name argument, and optional
'--populate' switch - use that for your origin-style remote,
it will seed the local topic branch system based on the
remote topic branches. '--populate' will also make 'tg remote'
'!' marks that it has missing dependencies (even recursively),
'B' marks that it is out-of-date wrt. its base).
+ This can take long time to accurately determine all the relevant
+ information about each branch; you can pass '-t' to get just
+ terse list of topic branch names quickly. Alternately, you can
+ pass '--graphviz' to get a dot-suitable output to draw a dependency
+ graph between the topic branches.
+
+ You can also use the --sort option to sort the branches using
+ a topological sort. This is especially useful if each
+ TopGit-tracked topic branch depends on a single parent branch,
+ since it will then print the branches in the dependency
+ order. In more complex scenarios, a text graph view would be
+ much more useful, but that is not yet implemented.
+
+ The --deps option outputs dependency informations between
+ branches in a machine-readable format. Feed this to "tsort"
+ to get the output from --sort.
+
+ Options:
+ -i Use TopGit meta data from the index instead of branch
+ -w Use TopGit meta data from the working tree instead of branch
+
TODO: Speed up by an order of magnitude
- TODO: Graph view
+ TODO: Text graph view
tg export
~~~~~~~~~
in the cleaned up history (corresponding basically exactly
to `tg patch` output for the topic branch).
- The command has two posible outputs now - either a Git branch
- with the collapsed history, or a quilt series in new directory.
+ The command has three possible outputs now - either a Git branch with
+ the collapsed history, a Git branch with a linearized history, or a
+ quilt series in new directory.
In case of producing collapsed history in new branch,
- You can use this collapsed structure either for providing
+ you can use this collapsed structure either for providing
a pull source for upstream, or further linearization e.g.
for creation of a quilt series using git log:
`- t/bar/good <,-------------------'/
`- t/baz ---------------------'
+ In case of using the linearize mode:
+
+ master$ tg export --linearize for-linus
+
+ you get a linear history respecting the dependencies of your patches in
+ a new branch for-linus. The result should be more or less the same as
+ using quilt mode and reimporting it into a Git branch. (More or less
+ because the topologic order can usually be extended in more than one
+ way into a complete ordering and the two methods may choose different
+ one's.) The result might be more appropriate for merging upstream as
+ it contains fewer merges.
+
+ Note that you might get conflicts during linearization because the
+ patches are reordered to get a linear history.
+
In case of the quilt mode,
master$ tg export --quilt for-linus
and an argument specifying the directory
where the quilt series should be saved.
- Usage: tg export ([--collapse] BRANCH | --quilt DIR)
+ With '--quilt', you can also pass '-b' parameter followed by
+ a comma-separated explicit list of branches to export. This
+ mode of operation is currently not supported with collapse.
+
+ In '--quilt' mode the patches are named like the originating topgit
+ branch. So usually they end up in subdirectories of the output
+ directory. With option '--flatten' the names are mangled such that
+ they end up directly in the output dir (i.e. slashed are substituted by
+ underscores). With '--numbered' (which implies '--flatten') the patch
+ names get a number as prefix to allow getting the order without
+ consulting the series file, which eases sending out the patches.
+
+ Usage: tg export ([(--collapse | --linearize)] BRANCH | --quilt DIR)
TODO: Make stripping of non-essential headers configurable
TODO: Make stripping of [PATCH] and other prefixes configurable
TODO: --mbox option for other mode of operation
- TODO: -n option to prevent exporting of empty patches
TODO: -a option to export all branches
- TODO: Allow branches to be exported to be passed as arguments, default
- to the current branch if none are specified
- TODO: For quilt exporting, use a temporary branch and remove it when
- done - this would allow producing conflict-less series
+ TODO: For quilt exporting, export the linearized history created in a
+ temporary branch---this would allow producing conflict-less
+ series
+
+tg import
+~~~~~~~~~
+ Import commits within the given revision range into TopGit,
+ creating one topic branch per commit, the dependencies forming
+ a linear sequence starting on your current branch (or a branch
+ specified by the '-d' parameter).
+
+ The branch names are auto-guessed from the commit messages
+ and prefixed by t/ by default; use '-p PREFIX' to specify
+ an alternative prefix (even an empty one).
+
+ Alternatively, you can use the '-s NAME' parameter to specify
+ the name of target branch; the command will then take one more
+ argument describing a single commit to import.
tg update
~~~~~~~~~
- Update the current topic branch wrt. changes in the branches
- it depends on and remote branches.
+ Update the current or specified topic branch wrt. changes in the
+ branches it depends on and remote branches.
This is performed in two phases - first,
changes within the dependencies are merged to the base,
then the base is merged into the topic branch.
The output will guide you in case of conflicts.
+ After the update the current branch is the specified one.
+
In case your dependencies are not up-to-date, tg update
will first recurse into them and update these.
TODO: tg update -a for updating all topic branches
-TODO: Some infrastructure for sharing topic branches between
- repositories easily
-TODO: tg depend for adding/removing dependencies smoothly
+tg push
+~~~~~~~
+ pushes a TopGit-controlled topic branch to a remote
+ repository. By default the remote gets all dependencies
+ (both tgish and non-tgish) and bases pushed to.
+
+tg base
+~~~~~~~
+ Prints the base commit of the current topic branch. Silently
+ exits with exit code 1 if you are not working on a TopGit
+ branch.
+
+tg log
+~~~~~~
+ Prints the git log of the named topgit branch.
+
+ Note: if you have merged changes from a different repository, this
+ command might not list all interesting commits.
+
TODO: tg rename
When mailing out your patch, basically only few extra headers
mail headers are inserted and the patch itself is appended.
Thus, as your patches evolve, you can record nuances like whether
-the paricular patch should have To-list/Cc-maintainer or vice
+the particular patch should have To-list/Cc-maintainer or vice
versa and similar nuances, if your project is into that.
From is prefilled from your current GIT_AUTHOR_IDENT, other headers
can be prefilled from various optional topgit.* config options.
.topdeps: Contains the one-per-line list of branches
your patch depends on, pre-seeded with `tg create`. (Continuously
updated) merge of these branches will be the "base" of your topic
-branch.
+branch. DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE MANUALLY!!! If you do so, you need
+to know exactly what are you doing, since this file must stay in
+sync with the Git history information, otherwise very bad things
+will happen.
TopGit also automagically installs a bunch of custom commit-related
hooks that will verify if you are committing the .top* files in sane
was called on the last time ('topgit.remote' configuration variable). You can
manually run any command with a different base remote by passing '-r REMOTE'
_before_ the subcommand name.
+
+
+POINTERS
+--------
+
+The following references are useful to understand the development of topgit and
+its subcommands.
+
+tg depend:
+ http://lists-archives.org/git/688698-add-list-and-rm-sub-commands-to-tg-depend.html
~ian / topgit.git / blobdiff