Git tools for managing patchsets

[Michael]

On 2016-10-24, at 10:25 AM, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 09:37:37AM -0700, Michael wrote:
>> So since MacPorts is moving to git, and from what I saw in the "how to
>> use git" docs you mentioned, you apparently want people to work with
>> patchsets rebased onto the current head from upstream.
>> 
>> As I was thinking about that, I realized that you lose your history of
>> the patchset in the process.
> 
> If I understand this correctly, this is a problem that applies to
> repositories of source code, not repositories of build description
> files. The way we currently keep patches for our ports is putting them
> next to the Portfiles in what will be the macports-ports Git repository.
> Consequently, we already have the history of these patchfiles.
> 
> As an example, let's consider the yubico-c-client port. It's defined in
> MacPorts in
>  security/yubico-c-client/Portfile
> The patches to be applied to the source code of yubico-c-client are
> under version control in
>  security/yubico-c-client/files
> which already gives us a history of the patches.

My understanding -- and maybe this is my error here -- is that your patches have to be constantly rebased onto the current version every time the upstream releases a new version.

When you rebase, you have new commits, and a new history. So the history of how your patchset has changed over time resets at each rebase at each new upstream release.

That is my understanding of the issue; if this is wrong, then I'm trying to solve a non-existent problem.

(And if you don't have that problem, please tell me how you are using rebase and not losing history :-).

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