Re: Support for a series of patches, i.e. patchset or changeset?

Eric Miao venit, vidit, dixit 05.11.2012 03:26:

Hi All,

Does anyone know if git has sort of support for a series of patches, i.e.
a patchset or changeset? So whenever we know the SHA1 id of a single
patch/commit, we know the patchset it belongs to. This is normal when
we do big changes and split that into smaller pieces and doing only one
simple thing in a single commit.

This will be especially useful when tracking and cherry-picking changes,
i.e. monitoring on the changes of some specific files, and if a specific
patch is interesting, we may want to apply the whole changeset, not only
that specific one.

First of all, if you know the sha1 of a commit, then all its ancestors
are determined by that. If you want to describe a set of patches, say
based on rev1 and leading up to rev2, then the expression

rev2 ^rev1

describes that set uniquely. Often you can do without ^rev1, e.g. if you
know that all patch series are developed bases on origin/master, then
specifying rev2 is enough as "git rev-list rev2 ^origin/master" will
give you all commits in the series (unless they have been integrated,
i.e. merged).

Or are you thinking about patches "independent" of a base?

Cheers,
Michael