RFC: migrating to git

[Tony Finch]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011, Claus Reinke wrote:
>
> What happens after the merges? Does one maintain the branches
> somehow, or does one lose the (in-)dependency information?

Remember that a branch in git is just a name for a point in the revision
graph. When you commit to a branch the name is updated to point to the new
commit. Names are local to a particular repository.

When you do a merge, you do it on a particular branch which is updated to
point to the merge commit. The other branches that were merged in (there's
usually one but you can create octopus merges if you want) remain as they
were. The merge commit contains un-named pointers to its parent commits
for use by git, and conventionally records the names of the brances that
were merged in the commit message for the convenience of humans. You can
commit to the other branches to extend them, or delete and reconstruct
them differently, without affecting the state represented by the merge.

Have a look the way "topic branches" are used in the maintenance of
git itself as an example of how to deal with a collection of independent
patches.
http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=MaintNotes;hb=refs/heads/todo

Tony.
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