RE: Beginner's question on how to use git for multiple parallel versions

Dear Bill,

Thanks for your prompt reply. It may very well be exactly what I need, but
I'm afraid that I don't understand the syntax just yet (am still in the
phase orienting on what version management is and how it should be set up).

Could you please add to your answer whether I am using branches or another
git technique (terminology?) and whether these are instructions that I can
use to commit a change once the system has already been set up or if these
actually are the instructions for defining the multiplicity of my project
versions?

Sorry for the newbie-ness and thanks in advance,

Best,

Chris


-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Lear [mailto:rael@zopyra.com] 
Sent: maandag 4 januari 2010 14:29
To: Christian C. Schouten
Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Beginner's question on how to use git for multiple parallel
versions

On Monday, January 4, 2010 at 12:29:52 (+0100) Christian C. Schouten writes:

Hello all,

I've got a project that I want to do version management on with
git but being a beginner in cvs/svn/dvcs etc. terminology I
don't know yet how to set it up.  My project needs to exist as
several parallel copies, i.e. there is a "main version" in
which I do my development but it needs to end up being available as a
couple of different configurations.  For instance, say there is a file
table.xml then this needs to contain different rows for versions A and
B. Likewise, a file process.bpel needs to be named identical for each
version but contain different content depending on whether it is
distributed as version A or version B. Any changes made in non-version
specific files should be visible in all copies, but changes made to
version-specific files need to remain isolated to that particular
version.

What you are asking for is this, I think:

% git checkout A
% cat table.xml
<table A>
% echo "<table A v2>" > table.xml
% git commit -a -m "fix table on Branch A"

% git checkout B
% cat table.xml
<table B>
% echo "<table B v2>" > table.xml
% git commit -a -m "fix table on Branch B"

% git checkout master
% cat table.xml
<non-version-specific table info>
% cat process.bpel
main line process stuff
% echo "add more process stuff" >> process.bpel
% git commit -a -m "fix process stuff on mainline"

% git checkout A
% git merge master
% cat process.bpel
main line process stuff
add more process stuff

% git checkout B
% git merge master
% cat process.bpel
main line process stuff
add more process stuff

Is that not it?


Bill