Re: Merging five months of Linux kernel history

Jan-Benedict Glaw [off-list ref] writes:

Hi!

Due to a move to a new flat and other reasons, I wasn't able to
do daily merges from Linus's tree into our vax-linux tree.
My time situation has improved and I want to merge all the new
and shiny stuff, but it seems a straight "git pull" isn't the
best way to do that.

What I'd actually love to do is to go through all commits since the
last merge and pull/accept/cherry-pick then one by one.  That way I'll
learn about new stuff. I'll specifically see generic changes that
imply arch-specific stuff, things I'll need to implement later on.

Is there any sane way to cluse such a large gap?  I don't mind looking
through tenthousands of commits, as long as I get a chance to spot
"important" ones.

I think the best way is:

	git pull
        git log ORIG_HEAD..

The latter would give your ten thousands of commits to inspect.

If the pull results in a conflict, then

	git pull
	git log --merge

	... fix conflicts ...
	git commit
        git log ORIG_HEAD..

Since ORIG_HEAD is transient, and you probably would want to
revisit the list of these ten thousands of commits later, it
might make sense to do

	git tag WHERE_WE_WERE

before "git pull" in either case.