gitq 0.0.5

git based patch manager

Git Queues

⚠️ 🪏 Work In Progress 🪏 ⚠️

This is currently a work in progress. Planned features for git-queue include:

• Baseline conflict resolution. If baselines conflict a queue can contain a merge commit to resolve the conflict. Rebase should somehow be able to deal with this in reasonable cases.

• Unapplied patches. If rebase fails due to conflicts, give the user the choice to save commits as patch files to be applied later.

• Queue history. Allow queues to be committed to git history so previous versions of the queue are not lost when history is edited. This is intended to be used for long-standing patch sets with no prospect of being merged upstream.

Description

This is my second attempt to make a git-based patch queue tool.

It's similar to git-pq, Quilt, Stacked Git, TopGit, Mercurial Queues, and others.

The goal is to assist the user in composing, and maintaining a well-organized queue of patches against a baseline codebase.

Use cases

Personal Integration Branch

You have multiple topic branches in progress, at various levels of maturity. One branch may be a very early work in progress, another may be in the initial stages of build-and-test in the CI environment, another may be almost done code review and ready to merge. In order to anticipate merge conflicts, functional interactions, and for general convenience, you want to do all your local development builds on an integration branch with all your open work merged together. After changes are made to the topic branches, you want to easily update the integration branch and keep going.

Submission Queue

You have a long series of changes you want to push to an upstream project. The upstream, however does not accept long series of changes. Their code review process looks at one small patch at a time. As each patch goes through the review process, changes are made and the reset of the queue must be updated accordingly.

Long Term Patch Set

You're maintaining a set of patches against an upstream project. For whatever reason, most of these patches are never going to be merged upstream. You need to repeatedly rebase this patch set onto new versions of the project. Essentially, the patches are your source code. You would like to use a version control system to track changes to the patches.

But Why?

None of the existing tools do quite what I want. In particular, Git Queues has the following distinguishing characteristics

• Queues can have multiple baselines.

• A queue is a git branch. All queue information is stored in a single branch. There are no auxiliary refs, no information stored anywhere else. A queue can be pushed and pulled to remotes as an ordinary branch. There is no git queue push or git queue pull.

• Each patch is a git commit. As much as possible, ordinary git commands are used to manipulate patches.

• The commit history of a queue feels like a git commit history. That is, commits are user-curated checkpoints, with user-written commit messages. The history is not a detailed log of every micro-operation that was used to create a queue. The data model is as simple as possible. Git is a "stupid" content tracker, because it tracks versions of the content of a source directory. There is no specific representation in git to, for example, move a file. The contents of the file are simply moved to a new location. Git Queues aims to track the content of a patch series in the same spirit that Git tracks the content of a directory.

git-swap

git-swap re-orders commits like git rebase -i, but is easier to use. In particular, conflicts must often be resolved twice when using rebase, but not with git-swap. git-swap reverses the order of two adjacent commits, while holding the final content constant.

git swap [OPTIONS] [COMMIT]

Swaps COMMIT with COMMIT^ (i.e. moves COMMIT one step earlier in history). Defaults to HEAD.

Options:

• --keep-going, -k — push COMMIT as far down the stack as it will go, stopping only when a swap would fail due to conflicts or a baseline boundary.
• --up — swap COMMIT with the commit above it (i.e. move COMMIT one step later in history) rather than the default downward direction.
• --edit, -e — if conflicts arise, suspend so the user can resolve them manually, then resume with git swap --continue.
• --continue, -c — resume after conflicts have been resolved.
• --abort — give up and restore git to its original state.
• --stop — abandon the current swap operation and push remaining commits back onto the branch.
• --squash — instead of completing the swap, squash the two commits together.
• --fixup — like --squash, but discard the lower commit's message.
• --status — print the current operation status.

When git-swap is used on a queue branch, it will not swap past the queue's baseline boundary.

git-queue

git-queue manages a queue. A queue is a git branch with one or more baselines, recorded in a .git-queue file committed at the root of the branch.

git queue SUBCOMMAND [OPTIONS]

git queue init [--branch BRANCH] [--title TITLE] BASELINE...

Initialize a queue on the current branch (or create a new branch with --branch/-b) with one or more baselines. Each BASELINE is a branch, tag, or commit.

git queue rebase [--add BASELINE] [--remove BASELINE]

Rebase the queue onto its baselines, incorporating any upstream changes. If a baseline branch is itself a queue managed by this tool, it will be recursively rebased first.

Use --add to incorporate an additional baseline, or --remove to drop one, at the same time as rebasing.

If conflicts arise during cherry-picking, the operation suspends so the user can resolve them, then resume with git queue continue.

git queue add BASELINE...

Add one or more baselines and rebase.

git queue remove BASELINE...

Remove one or more baselines and rebase.

git queue continue

Resume a suspended operation.

git queue abort

Abort a suspended operation and restore git to its previous state.

git queue status

Print the current operation status.

git queue tidy

Normalize and rewrite the .git-queue file in the current branch.

git-edit

git-edit checks out a specific commit for editing, then replays everything above it when you continue — similar to git rebase -i with edit.

git edit [COMMIT]

Detaches HEAD at COMMIT, suspending so the user can amend it. When done, resume with git edit --continue to replay all commits that were above COMMIT back on top.

Options:

• --continue, -c — resume after edits are complete.
• --abort — give up and restore git to its original state.
• --status — print the current operation status.

git-split

git-split splits a single commit into two or more commits. It allows the user to add a additional commits, while holding the final content constant.

git split [COMMIT]

Checks out COMMIT with its changes staged (via git reset --soft HEAD^), suspending so the user can make one or more new commits. After the user continues, COMMIT will be restored with it's original content, and git-split will suspend again so the user can amend the commit message with git commit --amend. After continuing again, it replays the remaining commits from above COMMIT on top.

Options:

• --continue, -c — resume at each suspension point.
• --abort — give up and restore git to its original state.
• --status — print the current operation status.

git-squash

git-squash squashes a commit into its parent.

git squash [--fixup] COMMIT

Combines COMMIT with COMMIT^. Opens an editor to compose the combined commit message (like git commit --squash). With --fixup/-f, discards COMMIT's message and keeps only the parent's (like git commit --fixup).